Google has unveiled its new “mindboggling” quantum chip, dubbed "Willow," that has left the world’s fastest supercomputers in the dust.
According to The Verge, Google claimed that the new quantum chip launched on Monday, December 9, 2024, is capable of solving complex problems in just five minutes that would take the world's fastest supercomputers ten septillion, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, to complete.
Willow incorporates key "breakthroughs" and "paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer."
A new chip has left behind Google’s 2019 quantum processor that could solve a mathematical equation in three minutes, as compared to 10,000 years on a supercomputer.
Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven writes on Google’s blog, “This historic accomplishment is known in the field as ‘below threshold,’ being able to drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits.”
“You must demonstrate being below the threshold to show real progress on error correction, and this has been an outstanding challenge since quantum error correction was introduced by Peter Shor in 1995,” he added further.
As per Neven, Google's Willow with 105 qubits “now has best-in-class performance,” while Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon are still working on their quantum computing systems.
Furthermore, experts believe that for now, Willow is largely an experimental device that shows that quantum computers are powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems.
