Google is celebrating having made great strides in the development of quantum computers.
A technology giant. Google presented its new chip to the media and analysts. JUSTIN LANE
Google has introduced a new 100-qubit Willow quantum computer chip. The company claims that it can solve a problem in five minutes that would have taken Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to calculate.
The random circuit sampling (rcs) performance test developed by Google was used in the comparison, i.e. a benchmark test based on the sampling of random chips.
the BBC in an interview with the head of Willow’s development team at Google Hartmut Neven said that Willow will be used for practical applications, but he did not reveal the specific uses of the chip.
Neven claimed that Willow is the most powerful quantum computing chip published so far. At the same time, he predicted that a chip suitable for commercial applications will have to wait until the end of the decade. So far, the chips launched by various parties are now better used for research purposes, and the industry is still waiting for the development of sufficiently stable chips before the use of the technology expands.
Quantum computing could bring much-needed efficiency to the design of, for example, fusion reactors or new pharmaceuticals, Neven said.
HPC Wire reported that Neveni told the media and analysts in the situation that the whole industry sighed with relief when quantum correction was now proven to work in practice. Previously, it has been theorized that as the number of qubits increases, the amount of error typical of the operation of quantum chips would decrease. This really happened and the number of errors decreased exponentially.
The goal announced last year by the Finnish company IQM Quantum Computers is to build a 50-qubit quantum computer by the end of 2024. After this, the goal is to start scaling the quantum computer towards the goal of 300 qubits.