Google has announced its latest quantum processor, dubbed Willow. In a blog post, the tech giant claims this state-of-the-art chip stands apart from competitors due to two major achievements: its incredible speed in computation benchmarks, and the way it reduces errors exponentially as qubits are scaled up.
As per our headline, Willow is a benchmarking beast. Google tested the chip in the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark, which is claimed to be "the classically hardest benchmark that can be done on a quantum computer today." It flew through the calculation and completed it in under five minutes. By way of contrast, one of the leading Supercomputers in 2024, Frontier, would take 1025 or 10 septillion years to finish the same calculation, according to Google. That's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, which exceeds the age of the known universe. Of course, running anything for that length of time would be impossible in practice. Our sun is estimated to only have another five billion years of life left, for example.
