China made the best new supercomputer and it uses Chinese chips
There's a new supercomputer in town, and it has topped every other supercomputer on the planet.
The new Chinese supercomputer, dubbed the Sunway TaihuLight, was in the first slot on the Top500 list of supercomputers Monday.
The fact that the Sunway TaihuLight is in China isn't anything special -- the previous and now second-best supercomputer on the list is also Chinese. But that one, the Tianhe-2, used chips from Intel, a U.S. company.
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The Sunway TaihuLight breaks the mold by using all-Chinese architecture, and it hits some impressive benchmarks in doing so.
The new supercomputer hits 93 petaflops, or 93 quadrillion calculations per second.
As a basis for comparison, Intel's new 10-core processor for home computing sounds positively puny next to the TaihuLight's 10.65 million cores, which is considerably higher than the 560,000 cores of the U.S.'s top supercomputer -- Titan, a Cray XK7 system. The Titan is located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is currently ranked third in the Top500.
With 10.65 million cores, the new biggest supercomputer in town hits 93 petaflops, or 93 quadrillion calculations per second.
And with that kind of power, the TaihuLight -- on its own -- comprises 16.4 percent of the total computing performance on the list, against all 499 other entrants.
Not only does China's new supercomputer have impressive processing power, it's also surprisingly energy-efficient. A lot of power is expended on RAM, and the TaihuLight uses a smaller amount of RAM than less-powerful computers.
This is also the first time that the U.S. does not have the most supercomputers on the Top500 list. China now leads the list with 167 entries, including the top two, while the U.S. is in second place with 165 computers.
It's possible that the U.S. could bounce back, as Intel is expected to announce a new high-level chip at the 2016 International Supercomputer Conference this week.
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