Re: D-Wave processors are like GPUs
D-Wave's current product cannot, in principle, implement Shor's algorithm due to the limitations of their implementation (or "implementation").
Not that working D-Wave device would not be useful if it would actually work (and by saying "work", I mean work as in "outclass classical algorithms"), but breaking public key cryptography would not be one of the problems this device would perform.
In any case, it looks like these guys are not even there - for years they seem to be moving the goalposts when it comes to benchmark metrics and to this day still struggle to even prove the device is actually performing quantum computation. To me it looks like they gave up on the comparing the speed with state-of-the-art classical computers, I remember a year or so ago they were using single threaded classical implementation as a reference (I can only guess if this was the only "crippling" done), now even this is off the table. Not that this would be a problem in itself, even if the first quantum implementation would be slower than "state of the art" classical implementation, it would still be huge and more than worth pursuing, as it is often the case that the early versions of new technologies are less efficient than the current state-of-the-art. No, the problem is - they seem to be constantly moving the goalposts.
I would very much like to be wrong in this case, but to a complete outsider like myself, their behavior awfully looks like trying to sell the hype. I apologize to the honest hard working scientists and engineers who probably invested millions of man-hours and sleepless nights working for this company, but something just smells fishy with regards to the company's outside behavior.
This is to be expected, I guess - as with every big "new thing" in IT, there is a lot of hype and PR spin. Quantum computing is not exactly "new" at least as a concept, but the actual working implementation which can solve real-world problems faster than classical computing would be absolutely huge, probably the biggest technological jump since the first computer.
So, yes, the whole thing is big. But I am not sure if these guys will be the pioneers.
Again, I would like to be wrong but everything so far points more to attempts to hype their way out of investment losses than actual progress :(
Biting the hand that feeds IT
