Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I Bought Iran’s Secret Quantum Computing Chip”.
Here it is the moment you’ve all been waiting for Linus Tech tips. First, ever Quantum processor, this Quantum Zed board is the first step toward a brighter future. Soon, we’ll optimize everything from Labs, testing to Vacation, scheduling, we’ll use, machine learning and simulation to produce the most sought after merch, it’s going to be great okay, so Iran just admitted four hours before we sat down to film this, that their previous statements are kind of Bs but darn it, we wrote a pretty sweet video about what this thing actually is. So I say we’re gon na shoot it anyway. A few weeks ago, the Iranian government announced this to the world the first product of the quantum processing algorithm of the Imam Khomeini University of Marine Sciences and Technologies.
Apparently, this Zed board from digilens is meant for a system to counter navigation, deception and detecting surface vessels. Using the quantum algorithms well, I bought one off eBay and it’s definitely not using Quantum algorithms. It’S a garden variety fpga board, no Quantum bits or qubits no atom trapping lasers, no cryogenic low noise amplifiers, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t cool. So, just what the heck is, this Zed board and what other nonsense has come out of Iran over the years? Oh and who’s.
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Looking at this board can be to say the least, especially if you’re only familiar with a typical PC motherboard. There are a ton of little buttons and dip switches and LEDs, all of which are controlled via programmable logic or PL, want to physically turn your audio on or off, or enable a block of code. With the flip of a switch.
You program that to one of the buttons or switches and you’re good to go at least provided your code works. But why is this thing so expensive did I mention that this costs almost six hundred dollars for a dual core A9 with DDR3 like what okay? Well, the A9 course aren’t the only logic processing on this board. The other part is an fpga, and these are super cool fpga stands for field, programmable gate array and it’s kind of like a regular microcontroller or an Asic, except that, instead of baking the configuration of the transistors in at the time of manufacturing, they can actually be Reconfigured in the field, this allows you to use one piece of hardware for as many functions as you can program and load onto it.
So you take the logic cells on board and you group them into blocks of instructions known as ipcores the more cells you have. The more capable your board is of Performing operations like ethernet packet inspection or the video processing, see this heat spreader right here, underneath it is our zinc 7000 apsoc alongside 85 000 Series, 7 programmable logic cells, but while that might sound like a lot AMD, just released The versal premium vp1902, an fpga based adaptive SOC with 18 and a half million LCS, that’s meant for prototyping and emulation more on that later. Coming back to the Zed board that Iran showed off the reason it’s so weak is because well it isn’t even new the zinc 7000 SOC family was introduced in March 2011, and the Zed board followed a year later in August of 2012., just a few short months Before the world was supposed to end and while I’m sure that someone somewhere can use it for some part of the chain, I don’t know maybe to monitor the thermostat of your quantum computer, the coldest place, the known known realistically.
This is a basic Dev board. That’S meant for people wanting to try out fpga or prototype a very basic Asic before they move to mass production. Actually, on that subject, let’s come back to one of the big use cases that I mentioned before emulation A major advantage of fpga is that, while it costs more on a per unit basis, it is much cheaper up front than doing a mass production run of a Fully baked Asic, so A major advantage of fpga is that if you have a niche use case, you can actually use provided it’s powerful and fpga to replicate the hardware of another system.
So let’s say you want to run some software that was built for an apple II or an NES or Sega Genesis, because those devices were so simple compared to Modern computers and consoles with some know-how. We can program an fpga’s logic cells to behave exactly and exactly like the original Hardware components of that old computer or console. I mean it wasn’t always as easy as buying a de-10 nano kit, fpga and following the Mr projects, documentation to get here.
Programmers had to visually inspect integrated circuits, which often involved removing the top layer of the chip, photographing and mapping the die layout. Then writing the core via Hardware description, language or HDL, which sounds like a lot of work because it is. But the advantage of doing this over buying something like a Nintendo, NES classic or just running on a computer is that you eliminate any misbehavior or latency.
That could be introduced via emulation for those of you who are new to emulation. Basically, it allows you to use the access processing power that we have today to interpret code on a software level within an operating system like Linux or Windows. It’S really cool, but there are inherent disadvantages and by going straight to Hardware, you’re cutting out the middleman and you’re convincing that game or that software that you want to run that it is actually running on the original machine it was built for that is really cool And our Zed board here is pretty similar to the de10 Nano, for example, they’re, both using cortex A9 arm socs and DDR3 memory, there’s just nothing Quantum about either of them. Iran’S follow-up statement to the world, then, was that it was all a misunderstanding. Of course, they know there’s no Quantum processor on board, they’re media, just goofed, you guys always fooling around next they’re, going to tell me they were walking this whole time. You know like they say Iran, but maybe they walked anywho.
With all of that said, it’s time with all of that said, it’s not actually impossible that Iran has made some progress in Quantum Computing and a zed board like this could be part of an actual Quantum system somewhere along the chain, but for it to interpret anything Using Quantum algorithms, it would need a Quantum circuit or a processor. If you want to learn more about Quantum Computing, we’ve actually got a whole video where I visited a local Quantum Computing company d-wave. But the short version is that a regular computer uses bit states of one or zero, while a quantum computer uses qubits, which can also be one or zero, but they can also be anything in between think of your bit kind of like a coin. Okay, so with a bit, the coin is either face up or it’s face down with a qubit.
The coin is somewhere between those States. That’S called a mixed superposition and to help stop coherence or the loss of information from the quantum computer into the environment. You need to keep the quantum processor as close to absolute zero as possible, something that currently requires a ton of energy and infrastructure, energy and infrastructure that the Zed board clearly does not need. But you know what you need: the new waffle, hoodie, okay, you don’t need it, but it’s super comfy and you can check it out at ltdstore.com.
So with all that cleared up, I think the best part of all of this is that this is far from the first time that Iran has pulled a silly stunt like this. Around the same time as this, they unveiled Thada a Hypersonic ballistic missile that can supposedly travel at up to Mach, 15 or 3.2 miles per second and – and it also has like incredible maneuverability that can totally beat up your dad or sorry. I mean um defeat. Any current missile defense system, Hypersonic missiles – those are nothing new, but many military technology Watchers doubt that fatah can actually do what they claim in the same way that Tech Watchers are uh sort of wondering if this is actually a quantum computer, then just a few months Ago, an Iranian Professor told the world that the python Universal software and python Global Network could be used to protect to the Future.
I hate to break it to you, but the only future prediction you’ll be doing with python is that we will see some data analysis and task automation written with python. It actually gets better. An Iranian scientist claimed to have invented a time machine, the ariac time, traveling machine to be precise.
Now, In fairness, Iranian government officials were quick to dismiss that guy and state that no such time machine exists, but he was the managing director of Iran’s Center for strategic conventions at the time, not some random crackpot and it doesn’t end there. During the recent pandemic, Iran tried telling the world that they had a handheld covet detection device that used magnetic waves turns out that that one looked less like an fpga board from eBay and more like a bogus bomb detector that was sold by British scam artists over A decade ago, Iranian scientists actually distanced themselves from that. One and the Iranian Health Ministry refused to license it. Unfortunately, this seems to be the kind of thing that happens when your country undergoes a massive brain drain. Some one or some form of government gains control.
Often a dictatorship, but not always, and a lot of your citizens leave for greener pastures, typically the ones who are trained professionals with the education and the money to do so. Between 2010 and 2020, Iran saw roughly half a million people emigrate, which doesn’t sound that bad until you consider that they’ve had a net negative migration rate since the early 90s yikes, I mean at least the folks who are remaining did have the sense to backpedal on This, even if it only took what like two weeks, you considering the state of the world right now, it’s probably an okay thing that Iran doesn’t actually have a quantum computer or a time machine for that matter. Uh, if you want to buy your own Zed board, we’ll have links down below, I’m not sure exactly what you or they will be using your Zed boards for, but it certainly won’t be to see this future message from our sponsor Micro Center. Everyone hold on to your butts, because Micro Center has got a lot of deals on deck for July, we’ll start with their upcoming store in Charlotte.
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