{
  "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 lightning.qubit. 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.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2609.19147",
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Shlomo Kashani"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/2wym39h4e4smv.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2609.19147",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "2wym39h4e4smv",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19147",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "quant-ph"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1702|Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7213579446",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.19147",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-01",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/2wym39h4e4smv.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:22:19Z",
      "native_id": "2609.19147",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19147"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:quant-ph",
      "subfield": "quantum"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Qupertino: Pure MLX Array Kernels versus Hand-Tuned Metal Shaders for Quantum Circuit Simulation on Apple Silicon",
  "title_text": "Qupertino: Pure MLX Array Kernels versus Hand-Tuned Metal Shaders for Quantum Circuit Simulation on Apple Silicon",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:22:19Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/2wym39h4e4smv",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}