It's just a slight grammatical ambiguity in the title, worsened by the "headline grammar" and the fact that it's a newspaper with a general audience. The headline is intended to be interpreted as "the performance of a particular computer that is marketed as a quantum computer is no better than the performance of an ordinary PC."
But it's pretty easy to quickly read the headline and interpret it as "the performance of ideal quantum computers is no better than the performance of ordinary PCs."
Assuming the correctness of quantum mechanics, a quantum computer WILL be faster than classical computers for specific classes of problems, exponentially faster in some cases.
I'm not sure about this part either. Some smart CS guys apparently think that quantum computing isn't even possible. Leonid Levin (yes, of the Cook-Levin theorem seems to be one of them: http://www.cs.bu.edu/fac/lnd/expo/qc.htm.
Comments
It's just a slight grammatical ambiguity in the title, worsened by the "headline grammar" and the fact that it's a newspaper with a general audience. The headline is intended to be interpreted as "the performance of a particular computer that is marketed as a quantum computer is no better than the performance of an ordinary PC."
But it's pretty easy to quickly read the headline and interpret it as "the performance of ideal quantum computers is no better than the performance of ordinary PCs."
I'm not sure about this part either. Some smart CS guys apparently think that quantum computing isn't even possible. Leonid Levin (yes, of the Cook-Levin theorem seems to be one of them: http://www.cs.bu.edu/fac/lnd/expo/qc.htm.