It doesn’t matter how technologically advanced something is, the longer we play around with it, the less we are in awe of its brilliance. The CPUs/chips that power our electronic devices are amazing but may be starting to reach a wall.
I imagine most of us have heard that we carry around more computing power in our pockets today than was used to land man on the moon. It is true. Makes you realise how much your TikTok doom-scroll sessions severely underutilise that smartphone of yours.
Well, CPUs have been improving at a blazing pace over the past decades but are hitting a wall now. They have gotten as small as they can be. Those are just the limits that laws of physics impose on it, if we shrunk chips any further we would run into problems at the nanoscale.
So, there are alternatives being looked into and the one we’re talking about today is quantum computing.
Quantum computing
This is complicated stuff that I’m not qualified to talk about. However, we don’t need to know the specifics of how it all works to appreciate what’s going on.
Scientists say stuff behaves a little differently/unpredictably at the subatomic scale and that’s why regular old chips can’t get any smaller. For those so inclined, here’s the problem:
When transistor sizes shrink to the nanometer scale (approaching subatomic dimensions), quantum effects like tunneling become significant. In quantum tunneling, electrons can pass through insulating barriers, leading to leakage currents that waste power and make it difficult to control the behavior of transistors. This effect is one of the key challenges as transistor gates become smaller than 10 nanometers.
Quantum computing comes in and says, ‘Why not rethink this whole process and play around in that subatomic scale?’ So, it harnesses quantum mechanics to build computers that process information differently from classical systems.
We’re still in the early days of quantum computing but Google has some interesting news on the quantum computing front.
Willow
Google has unveiled its experimental quantum computing chip, Willow, which can solve problems in minutes that would take today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years (that’s 1 followed by 24 zeros, which I don’t think even Zimbabwe played around with in our hyperinflation phase).
In tests, Willow outperformed existing supercomputers in a benchmark called “random circuit sampling (RCS).” As the results tell you, this particular benchmark is difficult for the classical computers we use today.
That just goes to show you that these quantum computers could have uses that are unfathomable.
However, don’t get too excited yet. The benchmark which Willow aced is not without criticism. The biggest being that it does not have any practical application today.
So, essentially it’s like the very real “Most Armpits Sniffed Professionally” world record that some dude has. He’s the best at it but for now at least, we just don’t know how it will be useful.
Some researchers put this in even harsher terms. They argue that RCS is a contrived problem designed specifically to highlight quantum advantages, rather than addressing real-world problems. So, yeah, there are concerns about its relevance to practical applications.
Also, don’t sleep on classical computing, it has improved at this RCS thing, however pointless it might seem today. New algorithms have made simulating RCS less computationally demanding than previously thought, narrowing the perceived gap between classical and quantum performance.
That said, I’m not trying to rain on Google’s parade. It’s important to note that RCS is a widely accepted benchmark in the quantum computing field, and Google’s achievement in significantly outperforming classical supercomputers on this task is still a significant milestone.
It demonstrates progress in quantum error correction and the potential for future quantum computers to solve problems that are currently difficult for classical computers.
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