Willow, Google's new quantum chip, outperforms supercomputers in computation speed

Google has finally launched Willow, its newest quantum chip. The Mountain View tech giant boasts that this quantum computing chip can perform tasks that would take traditional computers ten septillion years (or, ten billion billion billion years) in just five minutes.

That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, as Google claims. It’s a lot of numbers, which exceed far beyond our own existence on Earth as humans. Google says that Willow demonstrates a benchmark performance 10^25 times faster than today’s supercomputers, greatly reduces error rates from its predecessor, and achieves quantum error correction as it scales up.

At its core, quantum computing is different from classical computing. It uses quantum bits (qubits) that can exist in multiple states simultaneously, which allows for vastly greater computational power. Not like regular computers that use bits (0s and 1s), qubits can be both 0 and 1 at once.

Hartmut Neven, Google Quantum AI’s founder, says that “the more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes.”

So, during an experiment for Willow, Google’s researchers were able to demonstrate an exponential reduction in the error rate by scaling up from smaller grids of qubits to larger arrays, achieving real-time error correction on a superconducting quantum system.

This result marks a “below threshold” milestone, with real progress in quantum error correction and indicating that Willow is a promising prototype for scalable logical qubits. That also brings us closer to quantum computing in practical, commercially-relevant applications.

“Willow is the latest step in our Quantum AI team’s work to unlock the full potential of quantum computing,” says Google Quantum’s Anthony Megrant and Yu Chen in a joint blog post.

Earlier this year, Microsoft, Google’s competitor, also secured funding from DARPA for its quantum computer project.