With the AI race intensifying, the need for super fast, high performance computing chips is far outstripping future demands. And as tech companies globally race to develop in-house chips, Google has now unveiled its latest quantum chip ‘Willow’, which is capable of performing calculations that would take current supercomputers an inconceivably long time to complete. The chip was developed at Google’s specialized facility in Santa Barbara, California. For now, Willow is still in the experimental stage.
According to Hartmut Neven, founder and lead at Google Quantum AI, the company’s Willow chip represents a combination of two major achievements in the realm of quantum computing: enhanced error correction and significant improvements in speed. The company’s announcement reveals a specific benchmark — random circuit sampling (RCS) — that Willow completed in less than five minutes. According to Google, the same task would take the world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier, a total of 10 septillion years to solve. For reference, 10 septillion years is older than the universe itself.
“The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges. As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications,” Neven wrote in the blog post.
One of the primary challenges in quantum computing is the susceptibility of qubits, the fundamental units of quantum computers, to errors. Unlike classical bits, which exist in a binary state of either 0 or 1, qubits can represent multiple states simultaneously, thanks to superposition. Due to this, qubits are highly sensitive to their environment. This is where Google’s engineers come in, and Willow scales up the number of qubits and simultaneously reduces errors. As the number of qubits increases, the error rate is reduced exponentially, a feat that researchers have been striving to achieve for decades.
As qubits are added to a system, the potential for errors increases, and without effective error correction, the system becomes less reliable. Willow, with its 105 qubits, has proven that it can handle larger arrays of qubits while maintaining lower error rates. According to Google, the error rate halves as the number of qubits increases, something that is crucial for future quantum systems that aim to solve complex problems.
For those who need a refresher, quantum computing leverages the principles of quantum mechanics, a branch of physics that deals with the behavior of very small particles, such as atoms and photons. As mentioned earlier, they use qubits, while classical computers use bits to represent data as either 0s or 1s. With this, they can process many possibilities simultaneously, which makes them potentially much more powerful for solving complex problems. A quantum chip, on the other hand, carries out quantum computing tasks and contains the necessary components to manipulate qubits, and are built using specialized materials and tech.
