D-Wave is a company that makes quantum annealers, specialized hardware that is most effective when applied to a class of optimization problems. The new work shows that the hardware can track the behavior of a quantum system called an Ising model far more efficiently than any of the current state-of-the-art classical algorithms.

D-Wave Quantum said Wednesday that it had not only achieved “quantum supremacy,” but had done so using a practical problem, marking an industry first. The quantum-computing company said its Advantage2 system solved a problem in 20 minutes that would take one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers nearly 1 million years to complete.