Here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for.
Linus Tech Tips' first ever quantum processor.
This quantum Z 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 were kind of BS.
But darn it, we wrote a pretty sweet video
about what this thing actually is.
So I say we're going to 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 Z board from Digilent
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 Z board?
And what other nonsense has come out of Iran over the years?
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All right, we already know what the Z board isn't.
So why don't we change gears and talk about what it is?
It's a low cost development board
for the Xilinx Zynq 7000 AP SoC
or all programmable system on a chip.
It's got a dual core arm cortex A9 processor,
gigabit LAN, 512 gigs of DDR3 SD Ram
and SD card slot for storage along with onboard audio,
HDMI and VGA, as well as a cute little OLED screen here.
Now, looking at this board can be a little confusing
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
then 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 $600
for a dual core A9 with DDR3?
Like what?
Okay, well, the A9 cores 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 onboard and you group them
into blocks of instructions known as IP cores.
The more cells you have, the more capable your board is
of performing operations like ethernet packet inspection
or video processing.
See this heat spreader right here?
Underneath it is our zinc 7,000 AP SoC
alongside 85,000 series seven programmable logic cells.
But while that might sound like a lot,
AMD just released the Versil premium VP 1902
and 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 7,000 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 in the known universe.
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 upfront
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 sufficiently powerful,
an FPGA to replicate the hardware of another system.
So let's say you wanna 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 DE10 nano kit FPGA
and following the Mr. Project's 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 wanna run
that it is actually running on the original machine
it was built for.
That is really cool.
And our Z 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.
Their media just goofed.
You guys, always fooling around.
Next, they're gonna tell me
they were walking this whole time.
You know, like they say, Iran, but maybe they walked.
Any who, with all of that said, it's.
With all of that said, it's not actually impossible
that Iran has made some progress in quantum computing
and a Z 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 wanna 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 decoherence 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 Z 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 lttstore.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 Fada,
a hypersonic ballistic missile
that can supposedly travel at up to Mach 15
or 3.2 miles per second.
And it also has like incredible maneuverability
that could totally beat up your dad.
Sorry, I mean, defeat any current missile defense system.
Hypersonic missiles, those are nothing new,
but many military technology watchers
doubt that Fada can actually do what they claim
in the same way that tech watchers are 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 predict 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 Center for Strategic Inventions 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 COVID 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.
Someone 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 about like two weeks.
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.
If you wanna 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
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
check out the D-Wave video from a few years ago.
It was so cool that I would describe it
as like 0.1 degrees Kelvin.
That's an inside joke,
cause I kept saying degrees Kelvin.
You know, it's not a degree.