Google makes a breakthrough in the development of quantum computers. A new chip is capable of performing a calculation in five minutes, whereas 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 for certain workloads than even the most powerful conventional computer. The quantum machine is based on a quantum chip that Google calls Willow. It is the first chip that is significantly faster than HPC systems based on a traditional digital architecture.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years vs. five minutes

Google has developed a test workload for Willow and claims that this calculation would take a classical computer ten quadrillion years. A quadrillion is a number with 24 zeros and is called one Septillion in American English. Depending on the measurement method used, the universe would be around 13.8 billion years old: a fraction of a quadrillion. In other words, the world far lacks the traditional computing power to handle Google’s workload. Willow completes the job in less than five minutes.

Willow’s breakthrough is thanks to improved error correction. Quantum computers use qubits instead of traditional bits. Simply put, qubits can be 0, 1, or a combination thereof, and thus contain more information than binary systems. Only: The quantum bits are by nature quite unstable. The more qubits you cram together, the bigger the instability problem. Error correction can compensate for this, but quantum computing loses its advantage.

The more qubits, the more stable

With Willow, Google has developed a system in which groupings of qubits become more stable. The more qubits Google bundles, the lower the error rate, on an exponential scale. Google claims Willow is the first proof that large, scalable and useful quantum computers are truly possible.

Google announced in 2019 that it had built a quantum chip that was 10,000 times faster than a supercomputer. However, this claim was not universally accepted. IBM, among others, had doubts about the results. For Willow, the scope seems so enormous that Google has successfully demonstrated how a quantum computer can outperform a conventional machine.

We’re not there yet

This means that the era of quantum computing has not yet begun. Willow has 105 qubits and is almost infinitely faster than ordinary supercomputers in the workload developed by Google, but this workload is an artificial benchmark. Completing a really meaningful task, such as drug development, at lightning speed is not yet an option.

The successful benchmark does not mean that the quantum computer is by definition faster than a normal computer. Quantum systems are strange creatures that are extremely good at certain workloads like optimization problems. These are not just super-fast computers that will always outperform binary systems, but specialized machines.