Google introduces state-of-the-art Willow chip capable of outpacing a supercomputer

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent firm Alphabet, wrote on X, “We see Willow as an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical application in areas like drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design + more.”

Here’s all about Google’s Willow chip:

(1.) According to Pichai, Willow can reduce quantum computing’s errors exponentially, even as Google scales up its use of qubits (units of computation in quantum computers).

(2.) He also said the chip took less than five minutes to perform a standard benchmark computation, while Frontier, one of the fastest supercomputers today, would complete the same task in 10 ‘septillion years.’

(3.) The chip was built in the tech giant’s new, state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Santa Barbara, one of only a few facilities in the world built from the ground up for this purpose.

(4.) Willow’s 105 qubits help it give ‘best-in-class performance’ across quantum error correction and random circuit sampling (RCS). It’s performance is ~5x improvement over Google’s previous generation of chips.

(5.) Willow, Pichai stated, is a ‘major step’ on a journey that he started 12 years ago by founding Google AI. “The vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics,” the Indian-origin chief executive of Google and Alphabet said.