Google's new chip: runs faster than any super-powered computer

The Willow quantum chip was recently unveiled by Google, with the project's distinctive feature being its high performance.

The company claims that the chip's technology significantly minimizes errors as it scales. This was made possible by 105 qubits which also affected the performance in randomized circuit sampling.

How did Google achieve such high performance?

In order to achieve such a significant performance advancement, the work in production has been optimized. The changes are mostly in the gate operation, modified chip architecture, calibration, and others.

The company claims that the latest quantum chip copes with the benchmark test in 5 minutes, while the same standard test supercomputer will be able to solve for 10 septillion years. Such impressive performance figures capture a significant leap when compared to the capabilities of a quantum processor in 2019.  

The company shared the details of the testing research related to the quantum chip in the Nature journal. Referring to the data in that paper, the testing of qubits was done from a 3x3 grid to 5x5 and 7x7. And during each scaling, halving of errors became possible. RCS was used to evaluate the performance of the chip.

The study demonstrated that there is a real possibility of exponential minimization of the error rate. Thus, individual qubits have shorter lifetimes than arrays of qubits.

In 2019, when the company first claimed some quantum superiority, it received a negative feedback from critics. The criticism was based on the fact that a conventional computer would have done the job in 2.5 days and the result would have been significantly more accurate than in a quantum computer. On the defense of Google and confirmation of the reliability of the results came NASA. With the help of a supercomputer, they were able to confirm that the results coincide with the results of the quantum computer.