Two months ago we had a story that 14 qubits was the largest quantum computer yet (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404470). This one now has 128? Is this just a money difference, was this a huge engineering breakthrough, or is there something else going on here?
There's something else going on here. The one-line explanation is that true QC requires quantum entanglement to be preserved, for reasonably long time scales, across all qubits. It's not believed that the D-Wave 128-bit machine does this, although the 8-bit one seems to.
