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It measures just 4cm squared but it possesses almost inconceivable speed.
Google has built a computing chip that takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for some of the world’s fastest conventional computers to complete.
That’s 10 septillion years, a number that far exceeds the age of our known universe and has the scientists behind the latest quantum computing breakthrough reaching for a distinctly non-technical term: “mindboggling”.
The new chip, called Willow and made in the California beach town of Santa Barbara, is about the dimensions of an After Eight mint, and could supercharge the creation of new drugs by greatly speeding up the experimental phase of development.
Reports of its performance follow a flurry of results since 2021 that suggest we are only about five years away from quantum computing becoming powerful enough to start transforming humankind’s capabilities to research and develop new materials from drugs to batteries, one independent UK expert said. Governments around the world are pouring tens of billions of dollars into research.
Significantly, Willow is claimed to be far less prone to error than previous versions and could swell the potential of the already fast-developing field of artificial intelligence.
Quantum computing – which harnesses the discovery that matter can exist in multiple states at once – is predicted to have the power to carry out far bigger calculations than previously possible and so hasten the creation of nuclear fusion reactors and accelerate the impact of artificial intelligence, notably in medical science. For example, it could allow MRI scans to be read in atom-level detail, unlocking new caches of data about human bodies and disease for AI to process, Google said.
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