Google has been facing immense pressure lately from regulations that are looking into breaking off Chrome from the company amidst claims of monopolistic practices. However, the tech giant continues to focus on innovation and bringing about powerful solutions for its users. The company took the tech community by surprise by launching a new quantum chip, Willow, on Monday, which is said to be a huge leap in quantum computing as it can outperform the world's best supercomputer when put to an advanced test.
Google's breakthrough Willow quantum chip demonstrates powerful performance, even surpassing the most powerful supercomputer
Google's quantum computing team has been working arduously to develop an advanced processor, and their efforts seem to have borne fruit. The company achieved a major milestone by unveiling its new quantum computing chip. Willow is creating quite the buzz for redefining computational boundaries through its processor capabilities, which help solve a problem within five minutes, leaving behind even the most advanced supercomputers.
Quantum computers have faced a fundamental barrier since their inception, which is the error-prone nature of the qubits that bring in more noise, cause computational errors, and limit the stability of quantum computing. Now, with Google using advanced error-correction technology, the hiccup has been dealt with, marking a major leap in the category that mitigates the noisiness of the systems and is significant in redefining its scalability.
Introducing 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. In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would…
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) December 9, 2024
The Willow chip has achieved below-threshold benchmarks in quantum physics, which helps the system correct errors as it scales. This is done by reducing quantum errors exponentially by adding more physical qubits and turning them into logical qubits, which in turn reduces errors overall. Google's quantum scientists have been working to ensure qubit reliability by enhancing calibration protocols that help reduce noise and variability, optimizing device fabrication, utilizing advanced machine learning techniques, and improving coherence time.
Google Quantum AI's director, Julian Kelly, shared the major achievement by emphasizing how salient this step is in quantum computing;
What we've been able to do in quantum error correction is a really important milestone — for the scientific community and for the future of quantum computing — which is [to] show that we can make a system that operates below the quantum error correction threshold.
Google's ambitious goals are not limited to this achievement. It plans to go one step ahead by introducing a useful, beyond-classical computation. This would focus on the practical application of the technology and building on capabilities that surpass classical computers in dealing with complex issues.
