Google has unveiled a new quantum computer called Willow that excels at a benchmarking problem, but it still isn’t clear whether these machines can serve a practical purpose
By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
9 December 2024
Google says its new quantum chip is its most powerful yet
Google Quantum AI
Google has unveiled a new quantum computer and is once more claiming to have pulled ahead in the race to show that these exotic machines can beat even the world’s best conventional supercomputers – so does that mean useful quantum computers are finally here?
Researchers at the tech giant were the first in the world to demonstrate this feat, known as quantum supremacy, with the announcement of the Sycamore quantum computing chip in 2019. But since then, supercomputers have caught up, leaving Sycamore behind. Now, Google has produced a new quantum chip, called Willow, which Julian Kelly at Google Quantum AI says is the firm’s best yet.
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“You can think of this as having all the advantages of Sycamore, but if you were to look under the hood, we changed the geometry… we reimagined the processor,” he says.
While the most advanced version of Sycamore boasted 67 qubits, or quantum bits, to process information, Willow has been upgraded to 105. Ideally, larger quantum computers should also be more powerful, but researchers have found that the qubits in larger devices struggle to remain coherent, losing their quantumness. This has also been seen by competitors IBM and California-based start-up Atom Computing, which both recently debuted quantum computers with more than 1000 qubits.
Kelly says that because of this, qubit quality has been a big focus for the team, and that Willow’s qubits can preserve their intricate quantum states – and therefore reliably encode information – more than five times longer than Sycamore’s can.