What’s wrong with the Iranian supercomputer
Iran presents the quantum supercomputer with great fanfare, but the Net makes fun of the CPU unveiled by the regime. Here's what Deputy Army Coordinator and former Navy Commander Habibollah Sayyari is really holding in his hand
The presentation of a new quantum computer usually represents an exciting moment for the whole world, given that those machines are the emblem of what human technology can do. However, when the big electronic brain is presented by a regime, everything takes on darker and more sinister, but also farcical connotations.
Not only because, instead of being revealed by people in white coats, university professors or laboratory rats, the new discoveries are made to line up with the army, but also because the proverbial reluctance of the regimes to disclose all the relevant information, combined with their propensity to magnify what is in their possession, risks having even comic implications.
IRANIAN SUPERCOMPUTER OR SUPER CAZZOLA?
This is certainly the case with the Iranian quantum supercomputer, presented to the press in the form of the CPU alone (the "heart" of every PC) by Habibollah Sayyari , deputy coordinator of the army and former commander of the Navy, who underlined the importance of information technology quantum as a weapon to fight the threats of tomorrow.
However, it was enough for the photos to end up on the web to transform the solemn ceremony at the Imam Khomeini Maritime University in Noshahr into an embarrassing tumble for the regime. The comments of those who pointed out that the Iranian supercomputer is actually a 700-euro CPU that can be purchased by anyone, not just a government, even on Amazon, have flocked into more or less all languages.
It is a ZedBoard produced by an American company called Digilent, based on Xilinx Zinq-7000 SoC technology with two Cortex A9 dual-cores and 256 MB of storage space and 512 MB of DDR3 RAM memory. In short, no out-of-the-box performance, as indeed the price suggests.
Among the reviews of Amazon users, we can already read some amused comments relating to what appears to be a down-at-heel staging by the Iranian government: "I give four stars only because to unlock the quantum functions you have to overclock it and install the Iranian BIOS."
UNDENIABLE LIKENESS
You don't have to be a geek to notice that, ictu oculi , the architecture of the two cards is exactly the same, so the "voices of the web" have hardly made a mistake. In this regard, sources close to the regime have pointed out that it could be a fake model deliberately disposed in favor of a camera precisely so as not to reveal anything to Iran's enemies, but then at the communicative level the choice proved disastrous: the boyars of the Islamic state they could have devised a plastic card of their own, not commercially available and no one would ever know it wasn't functional, but using a model on sale, which anyone can buy for as little as €700, exposed the scheme to public ridicule.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/iran-supercomputer-dubbi/ on Sat, 24 Jun 2023 05:53:23 +0000.