[eghad]

Whenever D-Wave comes up on HN I'm always impressed to see how many posters who casually read one Scott Aaronson blog (not even the most recent ones mind you) think they're more qualified than legions of classically trained engineers and physicists from Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, ETH Zurich, MIT Lincoln Lab, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Google, et. al.

D-wave isn't selling a "universal" quantum computer, but the platform they are and have continued to deliver has shown real, tangible progress with respect to quantum tunneling (even though their coverage has been typically questionable, the best layman's explanation of their most recent results happens to be from Ars [0]). No we're not getting a "universal" quantum computer anytime soon and no they're never going to be accessible to average consumers (so remain skeptical of anyone who says otherwise) but those claiming D-Wave is a scam/con are absurd.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/is-d-waves-quantum-pr...

[Retric]

All modern computers are based on quantum effects, but Intel does not call it's i7 CPU a quantum computer. The D-Wave really does not fit the established criteria for a quantum computer.

However, they really want the publicity from calling it a quantum computer so they continue to do so.

[nickpsecurity]

There was also problem where the speedup might have happen with classical computing. They were comparing their algorithm for their architecture against a single CPU implementation done same way in one paper. I've seen FPGA's get 3 digit speedups on problems they could brute force when redone for their architecture. Something the size and cost of D-Wave machine could easily use something like FPGA's, ASIC's, and/or NUMA links. I'm not sure it would achieve the exact results but I'd like it ruled out that they didn't build a MPP of ASIC's for the specific problem.