close
close

Google says its new quantum chip is much faster than the world’s most powerful supercomputer

Google says its new quantum chip is much faster than the world’s most powerful supercomputer

A new, cutting-edge quantum chip from Google (GOOGL) has cracked the code to a nearly three-decade problem, the company says.

Google’s latest quantum chip Willow has demonstrated “two major achievements” in quantum computing, including “exponentially” reducing the error rate when adding more qubits – a challenge that has existed for almost 30 years, says Hartmut Neven, founder and head of Google Quantum AI, it said in a statement.

Qubits are the computing units in quantum computers and are typically electrons, photons or other subatomic particles. The more qubits used, the more errors typically occur, Neven said. This makes the system more classical than the quantum system.

Unlike classical computers, which use bits that represent zeros or ones, qubits can exist in a superposition state or be 0 and 1 at the same time. This allows quantum computers to carry out research and experiments that are not possible with classical computers.

“Errors are one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing,” Neven said, because they “have a tendency to quickly exchange information with their environment, making it difficult to protect the information necessary to perform a calculation.”

According to results published Monday in Nature, Google Quantum AI found that the more qubits used in Willow, the more errors are reduced. Google Quantum AI tested ever-larger grids of encoded qubits and found that it could cut the error rate in half each time.

“This historic achievement is known in the field as ‘below threshold’ – the ability to reduce errors while increasing the number of qubits,” said Neven.

In addition to demonstrating that it was “below the threshold,” Willow was able to perform a calculation in less than five minutes that would take Frontier, currently considered the world’s fastest supercomputer, 10 septillion years to solve. The assessment of Willow’s performance compared to Frontier “was based on conservative assumptions,” Neven said.

The Google Quantum AI team used the industry-standard RCS (Random Circuit Sampling) benchmark it developed to measure the chip’s performance, saying it is “the classically toughest benchmark that can be run on a quantum computer today.”

Willow’s successes show that it is possible to build a “useful large-scale quantum computer,” Neven said. Quantum computers are already being used to develop some novel drugs and develop efficient batteries for electric cars.

For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *