Google, who recently announced the results of its research into quantum computing, says Quantum Computer is More than 100 Million times faster than a regular computer chip. Google appears to be more confident about the technical capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which it has been experimenting alongside NASA at the U.S. space agency’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Two years ago Google and NASA bought a D-Wave 2X quantum computing system and the initial tests found that quantum computing system was unable to outperform regular computers. But now the Chocolate Factory has announced itself very pleased with the results.

The Chocolate Factory also ran tests on the machine using an algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo, which simulates running quantum problems on ordinary silicon. Google has announced that its D-Wave computer has outperformed a traditional desktop by 108 times, making it one hundred million times faster.

“We found that problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core,” Hartmut Neven, director of engineering at Google, during a news conference to announce the results, adding, “What a D-Wave does in a second would take a conventional computer 10,000 years to do.”

Conventional computers encode data in binary code, made up of zeros and ones, and known as ‘bits’. But a quantum computer uses subatomic particles known as ‘qubits’, made up of zeroes, ones and a combination of the two known as a ‘superposition’. Where three bits can represent any one of eight values, three qubits can represent all eight values at once. This, in theory, allows quantum computers to run far faster than conventional computers.

The decision to invest in D-Wave systems was a controversial one since some in the industry think that the company has oversold the quantum abilities of its hardware. While it’s significant that Google refers to it as a quantum annealing system, the company is still happy enough and, in September, signed a seven-year contract with D-Wave for more of its hardware.

Google has also published a paper [PDF] on the findings, claiming that the team was able to perform a calculation with the quantum computing technology that was significantly faster than a conventional computer with a single core processor.

The researchers emphasized that their research on quantum computing is still in the early stages and has yet to be commercialized which could take decades.

Commercial applications of this technology might not happen overnight, but it’s possible that eventually they could lead to speed-ups for things like image recognition, which is in place inside of many Google services. But the tool could also come in handy for a traditional thing like cleaning up dirty data. Outside of Google, quantum speed-ups could translate into improvements for planning and scheduling and air traffic management, said David Bell, director of the Universities Space Research Association’s Research Institute for Advanced.

“I would say building a quantum computer is really hard, so first of all, we’re just trying to get it to work and not worry about cost or size or whatever,” said John Martinis, the person leading up Google’s hardware program and a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.