Qupertino: Pure MLX Array Kernels versus Hand-Tuned Metal Shaders for Quantum Circuit Simulation on Apple Silicon

Quantum Physics arXiv:2609.19147 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 9 Jul 2026] Title:Qupertino: Pure MLX Array Kernels versus Hand-Tuned Metal Shaders for Quantum Circuit Simulation on Apple Silicon Authors:Shlomo Kashani View a PDF of the paper titled Qupertino: Pure MLX Array Kernels versus Hand-Tuned Metal Shaders for Quantum Circuit Simulation on Apple Silicon, by Shlomo Kashani View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:We present Qupertino, an open-source quantum circuit simulator for Apple Silicon, and use it to ask how far a simulator written purely in MLX array operations can go and what remains for hand-tuned Metal shaders. The framework ships two measured tiers. The pure tier dispatches structured gates to specialized MLX kernels: diagonal gates run as broadcast phase multiplies, controlled gates as masked half-state updates, and SWAP as an axis permutation; a paired dense-path ablation attributes a 25-33x speedup to this dispatch alone. The opt-in shader tier adds hand-written Metal kernels for every structured layer family in our benchmarks, including phase-LUT diagonals, GF(2) affine permutation gathers, fused tensor-product single-qubit layers, radix-4 QFT and Walsh-Hadamard butterflies, and basis-conjugated XX/YY Trotter layers; runtime fusion detectors route work to them while preserving circuit semantics exactly, confirmed by parity tests. In a four-way interleaved campaign on M1 Max (two warmups, ten measured repeats per cell), the shader tier is fastest by mean runtime in all 18 comparison cells against same-machine Qiskit Aer CPU and PennyLane this http URL. At 25 qubits, gate-stream QFT runs in 0.0591 +/- 0.0029 s (paired 47.2x over Aer, 95.3x over PennyLane) and TFIM Trotter evolution in 0.495 +/- 0.035 s (36.2x and 67.2x). Across a 29-workload suite, the shader tier's paired speedup over pure MLX reaches 25x, with 25 of 29 workloads accelerating above parity. The framework also supports variational ansatz workloads, QAOA, QCBM, Trotter-Suzuki Hamiltonian simulation, and OpenQASM 2.0 import (unitary subset); a preliminary MPS backend reaches 150 qubits on limited-entanglement workloads. Correctness rests on 253 Python tests, independent complex128 checks, and a Trotter-error curve against exact diagonalization. State-vector memory remains exponential in qubit count. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2609.19147 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2609.19147v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.19147 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Shlomo Kashani [view email] [v1] Thu, 9 Jul 2026 08:58:26 UTC (47 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Qupertino: Pure MLX Array Kernels versus Hand-Tuned Metal Shaders for Quantum Circuit Simulation on Apple Silicon, by Shlomo KashaniView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-09 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)