The Iranian university, in collaboration with the military, has unveiled a quantum processor with which they aim to revolutionize data processing. However, the displayed circuit board is likely just a developer mainboard that can even be purchased on Amazon.
What’s the deal with the presentation? Habibollah Sayyari is a rear admiral and deputy coordinator of the Iranian army, and showcased at an event the “first product of quantum processing,” as the processor was grandly announced.
During the presentation, he holds the few centimeters large circuit board in his hands, which, while displaying a nice circuit pattern, somehow looked too rudimentary to really be a breakthrough in quantum technology.
This was also recognized by former U.S. State Department advisor on Iran, Gabriel Noronha. He researched and shortly thereafter shared a picture from Amazon on Twitter, showing the same board. It is a development board that costs only 589 dollars – or converted 555 euros.
It offers only 512 MB of DDR3 memory and a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, which was already released in 2007. So the board is anything but a breakthrough. The Iranian news agency Tasmin has since replaced the image in the title with another one.
Quantum processors are supposed to massively improve calculation times
What makes the technology so exciting? Quantum processors – also called quantum computers – are supposed to exploit the laws of quantum mechanics and thus perform calculations faster. Instead of using fixed numbers, as is common with computers today, the quantum computer is supposed to calculate in qubits.
It doesn’t matter at first whether the qubits represent a 1 or a 0; they exist in a kind of superposition in between. Through entanglements, a qubit can make statements about the states of other qubits.
The website StudySmarter explains the system using an example:
You find yourself in the middle of a very complex maze, with one or two exits and millions of paths that end in dead ends. If you walked through the maze and went through each path and each fork separately, it would take forever to find the exit. That’s how classical computers would search the maze for the exits.
However, consider the case where not only you are searching the maze alone but have a lot of clones who are jointly searching the maze. They can tell each other which paths lead to dead ends, thus speeding up the search for the exit.
A quantum computer would search the paths for the exit simultaneously, with the clones being different qubits in the quantum computer. You can thus see that more qubits can significantly increase performance.
For more on the topic, you can learn from our colleagues at GameStar Tech: 1 second instead of 9000 years – Quantum computer outsmarts any supercomputer, but you still need to be patient.
Currently, many large tech companies are working on quantum computers, including Google, IBM, Alibaba, Honeywell, and Amazon. Google focuses on using a large number of qubits, while Honeywell works on commercial computers. Amazon, on the other hand, is working on a cloud solution.
Although there are already operational computers that can be accessed remotely, the system is not optimized for private use and is not necessarily ideal. It is more suited for complex calculations and encryptions.
One company does sell quantum computers, but they are more for educational purposes: For €8,000 you can now buy the first portable quantum computer – Here’s what you get for your money
