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

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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).

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(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.’

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(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.

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(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.

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