A general officer in Iran has promoted a homemade ‘quantum processor’. But the product shown turns out to be an ordinary computer component, and rather dated. It can be found on Amazon for less than 800 euros.
Who said that quantum processors had to be very expensive and inaccessible for ordinary mortals? You can get one very easily, by browsing on Amazon, and receive it at home the next day. It is in any case what one could believe, if one adheres to the account of Iran which says to have made a breakthrough in the field of quantum.
It all starts with a news item from the Iranian news agency Tasnim News Agency, in June, which claims that “the first quantum processing algorithmic product has been unveiled”. We see Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari holding a computer component in his hands, with a fairly futuristic look with this star-shaped structure around the central part.
Except that it is not a quantum processor, but an ordinary computer element that can actually be found on Amazon. That’s whatfound Gabriel Noronha, a former US adviser to the State Department and Iran specialist. The product held by Habibollah Sayyari can be found on the market for less than 800 euros.
The manipulation has also been spotted by other sites, such as PC Gamer, which notes that what the rear admiral is holding is a development system on a chip (SoC), whose characteristics are quite banal: a random access memory 512 MB and a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor clocked at 650 MHz. Typically a product that we found… at the turn of 2010.
The product itself (ZedBoard Zynq-7000 ARM) has been on the market since at least 2015. Several photographs of the board were shared on Flickr in 2015. In fact, we are on a component that is at least ten years old, with parts going back even further. Hard to imagine doing anything quantum about it.
In the description on Amazon, the product is used to ” create many high-performance applications in the fields of video processing, motor control, software acceleration or even the development of embedded systems under Linux / Android / Windows environment “. The question of quantum computing is not mentioned at any time.
A horizon that could change everything
Beyond the amusing anecdote, Iranian communication clearly reflects the increasingly preponderant role that the quantum will take on in military affairs. Not only for securing communications (with post-quantum cryptography), but also in nuclear, drones and radars. Topics that interest all major capitals, including Tehran.
The Iranian news agency also discusses these issues, talking about future threats and the need to pay attention to emerging and revolutionary technologies. According to Iranian communication, this map is used for military purposes. Quantum was also mentioned as one of the areas of superiority in future wars.
Building a quantum computer, however, remains a technological challenge. For the time being, research is on the way to creating small quantum machines, called “quantum simulators”. These will be tailored to solve specific problems in physics, chemistry, engineering, or pharmaceuticals. These are not universal PCs yet.
The particularity of quantum computing is based on the quantum bit (or qubit), which is a calculation unit that takes not only two states (zero or one, like a conventional bit), but simultaneous states. In fact, the qubit paves the way for a much greater computer processing capacity, through the parallelization of calculations.
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