Google is unpacking a breakthrough on quantum computer development. A new chip is capable of performing a calculation in five minutes, while a traditional supercomputer would take more time than the current age of the universe.
Google has built a quantum computer that is virtually infinitely faster than even the most powerful traditional computer for certain workloads. The quantum machine is built around a quantum chip Google calls Willow. It is the first chip that is truly significantly faster than HPC systems based on a traditional digital architecture.
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years vs. five minutes
Google has developed a test workload for Willow and claims that a classical computer would take 10 quadrillion years to do that computation. A quadrillion is a number with 24 zeros, and is called a septillion in American English. According to the method of measurement used, the universe would be about 13.8 billion years old: a fraction of a quadrillion. In other words, the world lacks traditional computing power by a large margin to handle Google’s workload. Willow gets the job done in less than five minutes.
Willow’s breakthrough comes thanks to improved error correction. Quantum computers use qubits in place of traditional bits. Qubits can briefly be 0, 1, or a combination thereof, and thus hold more information than binary systems. Only: quantum bits are inherently quite unstable. The more qubits you cram together, the bigger the instability problem. Error correction can compensate for that, but in doing so, the quantum computer loses its advantage.
The more qubits, the more stable
With Willow, Google has devised a system where groupings of qubits just become more stable. The more qubits Google groups together, the smaller the error ratio, and that with an exponential scale. Google makes the case that this makes Willow the first proof that large, scalable and usable quantum computers really are possible.
Google announced back in 2019 that it had built a quantum chip that was 10,000 times faster than a supercomputer. However, that claim was not universally accepted. IBM, among others, had its doubts about the results. For Willow, the margin seems so huge that Google does successfully demonstrate how a quantum computer can outperform a traditional machine.
We are not there yet
With that, the era of the quantum computer has not yet arrived. Willow counts 105 qubits and is almost infinitely faster than ordinary supercomputers in the workload Google has worked out, but that workload is an artificial benchmark. Lightning-fast performance of a truly useful task, such as, say, drug development, is not yet forthcoming.
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After all, the successful benchmark does not mean that the quantum computer is necessarily faster than an ordinary computer. Quantum systems are strange critters, tremendously good at certain workloads such as optimization problems. They are not simply super-fast computers, which will outperform binary systems every time, but specialized machines.