A few weeks ago, Iran made headlines around the world by announcing it had successfully developed and deployed a quantum computing product to support military operations. But despite Iranian Maj. Gen. Habibollah Sayari smiling for the cameras at the time of the announcement, the tech industry has been skeptical that gold-plated substrates on display as an example of the country’s quantum computing research are available on Amazon. I quickly realized that it was nothing more than a thing. , ARM-based FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) development board.
iranian took a little longer than expected It actually runs numbers on the company’s “quantum computing products.” Just recently, the country issued a formal withdrawal statement acknowledging that its quantum announcements had no quantum at all.
Imam Khomeini University’s vice-chancellor for research said, “The presentation of the FPGA board at the conference gave the domestic media the false notion that the board was a quantum processor, which in fact was not the case.” rice field(Machine translation via Tasnim News). Note that the problem is not with the announcement itself and the way it is presented. Apparently the problem was with the media in this country.
Still, the study’s deputy prime minister argued that Iran is indeed considering quantum computing in support of military missions, stating that “the rationale behind the proposed algorithm’s problem is that it interferes with the navigation systems of surface ships. , are important and endorsed for the promotion of maritime security.”
To be fair, FPGAs can (and often are) combined with quantum computing elements. FPGAs are typically introduced into quantum control mechanisms, both in standard computing (such as the one powering our reading experience today) and quantum computing (and if you’re reading this on quantum computers, be sure to leave a note ).
So the ARM dev board could possibly be really used for quantum computing research at some point. Still, there’s a difference between treading quantum waters on an FPGA dev board and actually manufacturing and deploying devices like Intel’s own Tunnel Falls Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) or IBM’s Quantum System One. . But the Iranian leadership seems to have thought it best to reap the (now meager and dubious) geopolitical gains by throwing its hat into the ring of quantum computing.
It may have been a bad move, but only Iran’s leaders are sure of it.
