China beats US with world's fastest supercomputer, but race not geared for AI work
The 2.198 exaflops system uses domestically designed CPUs only, a break from GPU-based supercomputers and a sign of China’s chip self-reliance push.
- A Chinese machine named LineShine has officially claimed the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer on the newly released TOP500 rankings, marking the first time a system from China has captured the top spot since 2017.
- Installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, LineShine achieved a sustained processing speed of 2.198 exaflops, which allows it to complete more than two quintillion calculations per second and outpace the second-place U.S. system, El Capitan, by over 20%.
- In a notable architectural departure from standard AI supercomputers that rely heavily on advanced graphics processing units , China's new machine achieves its record-breaking speeds entirely through domestic, custom-designed central processing units via its homegrown LingKun platform.
- The breakthrough comes as an uncomfortable strategic message for Washington, proving that China's computing sector can innovate around aggressive U.S. semiconductor export restrictions by developing high-performance hardware completely independent of Intel, AMD, or Nvidia chips.
- While China successfully seized the top position, the United States still heavily dominates the highest tier of global high-performance computing, claiming three of the world's five publicly verified exascale systems with El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora.
113 Articles
113 Articles
On the ranking of the fastest computers in the world, China has reclaimed the top position. A German computer is also at the front.
Chinese supercomputer declared world’s fastest
A Shenzhen supercomputer was declared the world’s fastest, giving China the crown for the first time since 2017 and further ratcheting up the transpacific tech rivalry. The LineShine computer is notable not just for raw speed — it is about 20% faster than the California-based El Capitan, which has topped rankings since 2024 — but for using standard microprocessors, rather than the specialist GPUs that most supercomputers rely on. US companies ha…
San Francisco. China surpassed the United States and ranked first on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, but according to experts these results could say more about Beijing’s desire to demonstrate its self-sufficiency in computer systems than about its position in the world’s artificial intelligence race.
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