Google Unveils Quantum Computing Chip Willow That Outpaces Supercomputers

The tech giant said that Willow can solve complex calculations in 5 minutes, a task that would take supercomputers far longer than the age of the universe.

“Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe,” Google said in a blogpost.

Quantum chip is a type of computer chip that uses the principles of Quantum mechanics, that deals with atoms and subatomic particles. Quantum chips use Qubits that can be 0,1 or both, whereas the regular chips use bits which can be o or 1 for processing the information.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, “Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field.”

“We see Willow as an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications in areas like drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design + more,” he added.

Google’s Willow chip is equipped with 105 Qubits. Qubits are fast but are error-prone, caused by something as small as a subatomic particle.

Google said Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This supports the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

"We are past the break even point," said Hartmut Neven, head of the Google Quantum AI unit, in an interview with Reuters.

Google’s rivals are producing chips with a large number of qubits but Google is focused on making reliable qubits, said Anthony Megrant, chief architect for Google Quantum AI.