Apple, silicon, & beyond
Google’s Willow chip
Here’s a number to get your head around: 10,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000, otherwise known as 10 septillion. It’s the number of years a conventional, silicon chip–driven supercomputer called Frontier would take to perform a standard benchmark computation set by Google. Given the universe is 13.7 billion years old, you’d be waiting a while to see the result. Yet, run it through Google’s latest quantum chip, Willow, and the task —the random circuit-sampling benchmark —would be completed in just five minutes. It’s truly remarkable, more so given the discoveries made by the Google Quantum AI division. It found that Willow could be engineered and programmed so the number of errors would fall if more qubits were used —previously, the reverse was true. Error–correction could also be carried out in real–time. “It’s a strong sign that useful, very large quantum computers can indeed be built,” says the division’s founder and lead, Hartmut Neven.