Andrew D. King, et al.

Both simulated quantum annealing and physical quantum annealing have shown the emergence of "heavy tails" in their performance as optimizers: The total time needed to solve a set of random input instances is dominated by a small number of very hard instances…On similar inputs designed to suppress local degeneracy, performance of a quantum annealing processor on hard instances improves by orders of magnitude at the 512-qubit scale, while classical performance remains relatively unchanged.