I know it's not gate model, but it does compute using quantum effects, and so any reasonable model of performance has to include for this sort of system.
IIRC D-Wave doesn't like single digit performance indicators, so they're aligned with Aaronson on this for once.
You're wrong about the theory side of things[1, 2], by the way. The discussion around adiabatic quantum computing is weirdly politicized. It's true that D-Wave's computer isn't a universal quantum annealer; but in theory such a thing is equivalent to a gate-model computer.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04471.pdf
[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0256-307X/35/11/1...
From what I can tell, the new hybrid architecture that D-Wave rolled out recently can handle way bigger optimization problems than before, and slice and dice them to fit on the still-fairly-small quantum chip. As long as optimization problems are important (and they seem to increasingly be so), something which can find lower energy states (better solutions) in a shorter time is indeed an advantage.
I for one find it refreshing that they're not always blowing smoke about supremacy the way Google is - instead, they keep pushing forward actual results, like this one published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0410-x about some spinglass thing I don't understand, but it seems like it's something ideally suited for what they're building.
Furthermore, real optimization problems have high connectivity, high weight cost function terms, and require higher precision than available. The first two will require an unacceptable overhead for fixed topology solvers. DW is not useful for real world optimization problems.
Google on the other hand has actually done something a classical computer can not do
Have you seen their hybrid system they just released? https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-cloud-service-lets-you-us...
Looks like it's a strong contender for people who have bigger, higher-connectivity problems that want to get ready for when the quantum processors are bigger.
The techniques for decomposing a problem and solving the sub problems are a big (exponential) overhead because of frustration effects which require you to look at the entire problem at once.
And for context the PUBO -> QUBO mapping (high order to low order) + topology embedding can blow up the number of variables by an order of magnitude or more. The solution space scales exponentially with the number of variables so a naive solver will again deal with a messy overhead.
And its shorthand for "computation which demands more than just inference across the statistical sum of the semi-incoherent output states you see in a sea of things" which as I understand it, is what D-Wave does: it emits all the things, and you do work to find the answer (which usually you knew a-priori btw, another gap in my feelings on QC right now: the worked examples always include for-knowledge of the "right" answer to help decode it from the output states of the QC under consideration)
BTW if I mis-characterize either the state of QC or D-Wave I apologize. I am not in the field. I get this view, from what little I can understand.
What we're forced to imagine is a future 5-10 years from now when they have 10k or 20k qubits, or they're all way more connected together, or something like that; there comes a point at which it will truly be very useful for big problems, and so the speculative player who wants to profit off of this would spend their time trying to actually make working models of something useful in reality which uses such an optimization solver as an engine underneath.
(You don't think transistors use quantum effects? Then what's Boltzmann's constant doing in the Ebers–Moll equation?)
I don't see what's "unstable" about a D-Wave qubit; it has an input bias and it has biases about the qubits it is connected to, which you can tune, and quantum coherence is held for long enough for there to provably be tunnelling effects involved in the process of settling down to a ground state.
I think there's a massive lack of understanding about quantum computing that includes a huge bias against these quantum annealers, and it's baffling to me - why wouldn't someone want to see this process work? Certainly their early customers and developers see something there that you might not.
Everyone's obsessed about Shor's algorithm, but it's not the most interesting thing in the world, is it? I mean, do you really want all current encryption to be rendered worthless by whoever owns it? I'm happier to see things go in the direction of solving optimization problems for traffic flow and scheduling instead of military uses, for once.
Calling them "quantum computers" is therefore unhelpful; it is guaranteed to cause people to draw incorrect inferences. It's like describing a slide rule, an op-amp integrator, or a harmonic analyzer as a "computer", except that that was common usage at one time. "Quantum annealers" is fine.
Now, while my comment isn't motivated by any animus against the devices, which indeed might turn out to be useful, I do bear a grudge against the company D-Wave. Specifically, I think they're billing their devices as "quantum computers" precisely because they want people to draw incorrect inferences about them. That is, by using that term, they're intentionally misleading people into thinking their product can do things it can't, in order to get press and investment money. That's a very bad thing to do, and they are bad people.
You ask, "I mean, do you really want all current encryption to be rendered worthless by whoever owns it?" There is a substantial field of "postquantum cryptography", with conferences going back 14 years, that will not be demolished by quantum computers. In particular, SHA-256, AES-256, and things based on them will be fine, and even a lot of cryptographic work from the 1970s will be fine if it uses those modern primitives. There are a number of public-key cryptosystems that should also work, but in most cases, we don't yet have the level of confidence in those that we have in the more conservative designs I mentioned above. The exception is Merkle signatures, which have their own disadvantages.
I have a second, more disturbing objection to your query about what "I want": you seem to be presupposing that my beliefs about D-Wave, and perhaps everyone's beliefs about everything all the time, are determined exclusively by wishful thinking. Consider, perhaps, that this may not be the case — some of the time people may have beliefs that they would prefer to be incorrect, based on, for example, evidence or careful reasoning. In fact, I would assure you that this is true, but certainly you could dismiss that as more wishful thinking on my part.
While it's convenient to attribute people disagreeing with you to "a massive lack of understanding" or to wishful thinking, often it turns out that they instead disagree with you because they know things you don't. Under those circumstances, it can sometimes be more useful to avoid insulting them.
To me you sound like an abacus fan who is waiting for Big Abacus to release an even bigger model, while Turing is labouring away with silly gears and cogs that you see no value in.
Please do not resort to personal attacks on this site. Your repeated insulting remarks do not rise to the standards of behavior we attempt to maintain here.
So it excludes DWave, and the unstable QBits, and focusses on a specific known problem which (I believe) gets closer to e.g. breaking useful real-world unknown value RSA, rather than simply being "how big it is"
As long as a graphics card is just painting pixels its mainly about entertainment. When somebody says "this graphics card can now exhaustively search 20 letter password strings against a known hash string and find your passphrase in under 30 seconds" then its a real issue.