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Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing (blogspot.ca)
An anonymous reader sends this report form the Google Research blog on the effectiveness of D-Wave's 2X quantum computer:
We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10^8.
A more detailed paper is available at the arXiv.
Just what Google needs: more computer power with which to monetize the details of your private life.
Look I am quite aware what the gate model quantum computer is and can do, but it is disingenuous to pretend that it is the only game in town, and the only such machine that is allowed to be called a quantum computer.
Two competing models have been shown to be computationally equivalent, namely quantum cellular automatons and adiabatic quantum computing. The latter you get if the machine can implement an arbitrary Hamiltonian. The D-Wave machine is restricted in that it can only implement spin-glass like Hamiltonians. But it computes with qubits. It is a special purpose adiabatic quantum computer. Deal with it.