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You’re not even wrong. A digital signal processor does computations, therefore it’s a computer... right? In general, these days, people, especially technical,

You’re not even wrong. A digital signal processor does computations, therefore it’s a computer... right? In general, these days, people, especially technical, usually equate “computer” to “programmable computer”. This is as evidenced by the continual confusion as to what a D-Wave machine does and how they’re inequivalent to universal gate-based architectures. A lot of folks these days call the kind of ‘computer’ that D-Wave is an “accelerator”.

adamisom 6y ago
Sounds like different definitions, not not-even-wrongness. Parent commenter even mentioned it's akin to an accelerator.
core-questions 6y ago
> A digital signal processor does computations, therefore it’s a computer... right? Yes, absolutely it is. Just like how Babbage's difference engine was a computer, just like how a calculator is a computer. It's not a stored-program Von-Neumann turing complete thing, no, but that's clearly not the point - if you want one of those, wouldn't you just go to Intel et al? The point of the D-Wave machine is to make super specialized optimization functions fast. Most of us, myself included, barely understand what those are or why they're useful. People interested in ML and neural networks, on the other hand, may find a processor designed intrinsically to work on entire graphs at a time to be somewhat useful. Maybe it's not big enough to do that yet, but ENIAC wasn't big enough to run Firefox - was it useless?