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Original article demonstrating that (currently) $15M of D-wave chip is at best worth $20,000 worth of GPUs... http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6195/420 ht

• sp332 12y ago
  A semiconductor fab to make those GPUs is easily over one billion dollars.
  • varelse 12y ago
    Your point? IMO it's an intriguing but completely unproven technology. In contrast, GPUs (a newer technology than quantum computers) waltzed out of the gate with 100x to 1,000x speedups over Pentium IV CPUs barely a decade into their existence. If D-Wave had shown anything like that, it would be a billion dollar company well on its way to disrupting NVIDIA and Intel in HPC. Instead, after nearly 30 years since the concept and 15 years after D-Wave's founding and ~$100M of VC, it's still just an expensive toy. https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/category/physics/page/4/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/category/physics/page/4/ All that said, hiring its best loyal opposition to fix that is the smartest thing I've seen Google do in a long time. And just to end on a positive note, here's a great book on the subject that explains the promise of the technology in great detail: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Anniversary-Edition/dp/1107002176 http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Annive... And here's another reason perhaps why Google is leaning so hard on this technology: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~nando/papers/quantumrbm.pdf http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~nando/papers/quantumrbm.pdf
• melling 12y ago
  It originally cost almost $3 billion to sequence the human genome. The cost is now approaching $1000.
  • alayne 12y ago
    And you would be spending $3 billion _now_ to sequence the human genome in this analogy.
    • melling 12y ago
      Nope. I'm saying that it's gonna cost $3 billion to figure out how to build the machine that can solve the problem several orders of magnitude faster. Once you understand how to build the machine, the second generation product will cost much less.
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• basicplus2 12y ago
  It seems to me the reason there was no evidence of quantum speed up is because there is no quantum speed up.. ie quantum physics is a statistical method and not a description of reality.. does no one else see this? When will the bubble burst?
  • bsaul 12y ago
    I'd say statistics are used as a way to describe phenomenons, but afaik quantum computers rely on the phenomenons, not the model or technic used to describe them.