Google has created a chip that "may be more than a billion times faster" than the fastest supercomputers

Google has created a new quantum computing chip that can be at least a billion times faster than the fastest traditional supercomputers already in existence. The new generation of quantum computer developments is called Google Willow.

According to the company, this development is the result of efforts to overcome the key problems that have held back quantum computing. According to The Independent, Google is confident that a quantum computer can solve a problem in five minutes, which would take a traditional supercomputer longer than the history of the universe.

Quantum computers can be much faster than traditional computers, but have many complex and often mysterious features that need to be fixed before they can be built and used reliably. Google is one of a number of companies, along with IBM and Microsoft, that are working to overcome these challenges with the hope of building a quantum computer that can actually work.

At this point, the system can still only be used for a math problem that has no obvious commercial use. But Google hopes that the latest generation will be a step toward the potentially transformative use of quantum computers in areas such as medicine, artificial intelligence, battery chemistry, and more.

The novelty comes from a new chip called Willow, which has 105 "qubits" that are the building blocks of quantum computers. Qubits are fast, but error-prone because they can be dislodged by something as small as a subatomic particle from events in space. The more qubits are packed on a chip, the more errors can lead to the chip being no better than a regular computer chip. Therefore, since the 1990s, scientists have been working on quantum error correction.

And so, according to Google, they have found a way to connect the qubits of the Willow chip in such a way that the error rate decreases with the number of qubits. The company also claims to be able to correct errors in real time, a key step toward practical applications of its quantum machines.

"We have reached the break-even point," commented Hartmut Neven, who heads Google's Quantum AI division, in an interview.

Google also said that they are focused on creating the most reliable qubits they can, despite the fact that some of their competitors are working on producing chips with more qubits.

Google manufactured its previous chips at a joint venture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but built its own dedicated plant to produce Willow chips. Company representatives are confident that the new equipment will speed up the production of future Google chips, which are cooled in huge refrigerators called cryostats for experiments.

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