Slashdot Mirror
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.
As somebody who has used a DWave computer... you're asking the wrong question. They cannot run Firefox at any speed. They're analog computers purpose-built to solve extremely specialized optimization problems. But they don't necessarily "solve" problems -- they're likely to find good near-solutions. If you write an LLVM extension for which bitwise operations are computed as a solutions to an Ising spin glass problem, then it'd be waaay faster to run your Firefox port on DWave hardware backend than it would use a simulated annealing backend.
And that would simply be awful.
You might want to read the article (or even the summary). Google is saying that their results suggest that these computers are NOT just doing simulated annealing, but rather true quantum annealing.