It wasn't really shown to be faster; see http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400. To focus on the "3600 times" issue

It wasn't really shown to be faster; see http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400. To focus on the "3600 times" issue, I suggest searching for the strings " Ising" and "CPLEX". Don't miss the extremely thorough discussion in the comments, which includes comments from Cathy McGeoch (the author of the "3600 times" work), Peter Shor (as in Shor's factoring algorithm), Scott Aaronson, Greg Kuperberg, and many others.