Quantum Computing

There have been some advances in quantum computing this year that have been off my radar.  I just read an article about "D-wave," with hundreds of tiny liquid helium-cooled loops of niobium serving as quantum bits.  It is either "35,000 times faster -- or 100 times slower" than current computers depending on how you benchmark it.  The problem according to this cnet article (link) is how do you compare a quantum computer to traditional silicon chip processors, which can be good at very different things.  Although, according to this Wired article quote it's already pretty impressive "[the traditional computer] had the best algorithm ever developed by a team of the top scientists in the world, finely tuned to compete on what this processor does, running on the fastest processors that humans have ever been able to build,” Rose says. And the D-Wave “is now competitive with those things, which is a remarkable step.”

I recommend reading the Wired article; it contains a lot of background.  I'm copying this paragraph to pique your interest. 
"The dream of quantum computing has always been shrouded in sci-fi hope and hoopla—with giddy predictions of busted crypto, multiverse calculations, and the entire world of computation turned upside down. But it may be that quantum computing arrives in a slower, sideways fashion: as a set of devices used rarely, in the odd places where the problems we have are spoken in their curious language. Quantum computing won’t run on your phone—but maybe some quantum process of Google’s will be key in training the phone to recognize your vocal quirks and make voice recognition better. Maybe it’ll finally teach computers to recognize faces or luggage. Or maybe, like the integrated circuit before it, no one will figure out the best-use cases until they have hardware that works reliably. It’s a more modest way to look at this long-heralded thunderbolt of a technology. But this may be how the quantum era begins: not with a bang, but a glimmer."