2 weeks Ago By Pratyay
Tech giant Google has announced its next-generation quantum computing chip- Willow. The company has claimed that the chip offers state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics. In terms of performance, Willow is extremely high performing and it can surpass classical computers and even supercomputers by a huge margin.
Through Willow the company has achieved two massive achievements. The first achievement is that Willow can reduce errors by a huge margin. On the other hand, a standard benchmark computation which takes one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years is done by Willow in less than five minutes.
“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,” said Founder and Lead, Google Quantum AI, Hartmut Neven. In order to measure the performance of Willow, the researchers at Google used the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark.
The RCS is considered to be hardest benchmark that can be done on a quantum computer today. It can be thought as an entry point for quantum computing and it checks whether a quantum computer is doing something that couldn’t be done on a classical computer. The performance of Willow on this benchmark is mind boggling and it does a computation in less than five minutes.
The same computation would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. In simple terms, the computation would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Willow is fabricated in Google’s new, state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Santa Barbara.
“System engineering is key when designing and fabricating quantum chips: All components of a chip, such as single and two-qubit gates, qubit reset, and readout, have to be simultaneously well engineered and integrated. If any component lags or if two components don’t function well together, it drags down system performance. Therefore, maximizing system performance informs all aspects of our process, from chip architecture and fabrication to gate development and calibration.
The achievements we report assess quantum computing systems holistically, not just one factor at a time,” mentioned official blog post by Google. Google has stressed that it is focusing on quality and not just quantity. This is because production of larger numbers of qubits doesn’t help if they’re not of high quality.
With 105 qubits, Willow offers best-in-class performance and this is across the two system benchmarks: quantum error correction and random circuit sampling..
