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- Hacker News
- China keeps winning....by Alien1Being
- China is likely the dominant superpower in this century. They have the manufacture capability and the numbers for that.by rbanffy
- The TOP500 rank is not a count of nodes, GPUs, or aggregate FLOPS.
Many systems have the node count to be able to run such benchmarks, but are not optimized or even capable of running them. Having these systems run these large calculations in a sustained way, and performing, is what separates a bunch of nodes together in a data center from an actual cluster that is able to run a benchmark like HPL or HPCG.
To sustain 70 - 80% of peak performance across hundreds of thousands of cores, you need a real low-diameter, high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric and a balanced memory subsystem, running on a system w almost no failures or network issues. A loosely-coupled cluster with an oversubscribed fat-tree will 'run Linpack' and then post an Rmax that's a small fraction of its naive peak.
Also, have a look at the Green500, and the systems there. This is not about bragging rights vendors, this is about placing commodity hardware, tuning it, and bringing it up to health in a way that squeezes all of that last performance possible out of the clusters on those lists. That's the opposite of vendor flexing - it's a craft that you cannot see in a simple node count, as some have been comparing here.
If you ever worked on this field, and with the vendors at this scale, you would know. Its not easy, its actually very hard.
... and imagine you need to deploy this, systems at this scale, w technologies that are sometimes just emerging and sometimes even need proper field testing * every 6 months * to be able to reach the scale and stability to land on these lists.
by bfgpereira - I wonder if the CPUs can be obtained for, say, a deskside workstation.by rbanffy
- > Two cores are disabled per cluster.
I’m sure there is a good reason for this, which is..?
by ziofill - Yield. Some fraction of cores had a speck of dust or something, but at 38/40 good cores per chip they got economical yieldby brianolson
- It is likely that those cores are dedicated to unrelated management, monitoring, and administrative tasks. This is common and many workloads are throttled on bandwidth anyway. For the purposes of the benchmark, those cores are not participating in the workload.
- You can see the list yourself at https://top500.org/by mlmonkey
- Interesting to see PAC mentioned on the slide, I'd have assumed security features would be a waste of transistors on something so compute-optimized - but maybe they want to isolate workloads from each other?by Retr0id
- Yes exactly. it means you can sell isolated work units. With cloud being, well, cloud, if you can do that, you then have a market, with bidders able to bid higher for more capacity right now, vs a lower bid for eventually.by fragmede
- I haven't kept up with the latest on supercomputing power, but I recall some years ago there being strong evidence that China had a couple of un-announced supercomputers that would have topped the charts. It makes me wonder what is publicly disclosed vs. actual.by chrisss395
- > We think it is highly likely that these LX2 chiplets are etched using SMIC 7 nanometer processes at the N+3 refinement, and we base that on the fact that the chip only runs at 1.55 GHz. That is nowhere near the 3 GHz that SMIC can push with that process, but it is probably lower to get the memory and core speeds more balanced. [1]
Based on the ARMv9.2.
[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/hpc/2026/06/25/a-deep-dive-on-c...
- Despite what it says at that link, it is more likely to be based on Armv9.3-A ISA, because it supports SME.
In the CPU cores designed by the Arm company, SME has been added only in the latest generation of Armv9.3-A CPUs, which was launched last year.
For each level of Armv9, there are many mandatory features and many optional features.
If the Chinese CPU does not implement all the mandatory Armv9.3-A features (and we do not know anything about this), then it will still be considered only an Armv9.2-A CPU, but even in that case it should be referred as an Armv9.2-A + SME, in order to not confuse it with the Armv9.2-A CPUs that have been used for a few years in smartphones, laptops and mini-PCs and which do not have SME, so they cannot have a comparable performance.
by adrian_b - Extremely impressive accomplishment considering they did this with Chinese interconnects and Chinese chips. This is a wake up call.by 2OEH8eoCRo0
- We're too busy regulating the tech, not granting access to US engineers and companies, arguing against power and data centers, stopping skilled immigration.
This is absolutely going to bite us in the face in five to ten years.
by echelon - Not the first time that happened, even for China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_computersby numpad0
- TOP500 can be done with inexpensive silicon. It is more about a willingness to aggregate enough hardware in one place. As a benchmark, it tells you almost nothing about computing power or scalability for other applications because it doesn't exercise the bottlenecks most high-scale applications have.
- Additional details in:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08633v1
https://www.servethehome.com/arm-cpus-take-number-1-in-lates...
https://www.top500.org/news/lineshine-debuts-no-1-top500-ent...
by adrian_b - TOP500 hasn't been a particularly useful measure of practical computing power in modern systems for many years because what it measures isn't a significant bottleneck in most real systems. It has become a measure of how much money someone is willing to spend for bragging rights. (HPCG is better in that it is a bit more bandwidth focused but still pretty narrow.)
Most companies with huge systems don't participate.
- I wonder if there would have been an opportunity to generate some finer-grained benchmarks with something like BiCGStab+ILU (or maybe CG+incomplete cholesky). Instead of CG+Gauss Seidel. The pitch being, you might have made different memory vs compute trade-offs with designing your cluster, but you should be able to select a fill-in factor for the preconditioner to suit it.by bee_rider
- This seems like a "sour grapes" comment.
The new Chinese supercomputer beats all US supercomputers also in HPCG, not only in Linpack.
What is remarkable is that this was done despite the US attempts of sabotaging HPC in China by "sanctions".
This uses custom CPUs designed in China, which implement an Armv9-A ISA with SME (scalable matrix extension) and which use fast HBM memory. These CPUs are fast enough that they do not need any GPUs for exceeding the throughput of the American supercomputers, which use GPUs. This is like in the Japanese Fugaku, which was the first to implement the Armv8-A ISA with SVE, but which now is rather old.
Like in all CPU-based supercomputers, for this new Chinese supercomputer it is much easier to reach a higher percentage of the theoretical maximum throughput, when solving any problem. So for most practical problems it will be faster than a GPU-based supercomputer that would have the same theoretical maximum throughput.
So this is a much more interesting supercomputer than those built by just buying some HPC racks from HPE (Cray). Because China was forbidden to buy the American equipment, they had to innovate and design their own. Eventually they made something better than what they could not buy.
by adrian_b - > Why aren’t these AI companies submitting to the TOP500 to show off their computing prowess?
my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list
It's just poker, they didn't want to tip their hand
by brianolson - Why would the scientific computing people want to tip their hand? It’s an open secret that the main point of these mammoth FP64 compute machines is to simulate nuclear weapons detonations to comply with the CTBT you’d think that crowd would really not be fans of broadcasting their capabilities.by ls612
- I have joked more than once that my teams might unintentionally have wandered into top-500 territory a couple times in the last 10 yeats.by rbanffy
- Is there international value to these designations? As in, would it be worth it for the U.S. to pay a bonus to anyone who qualifies into the TOP500, to offset the cost of the run?
- My sense is you only submit if you are in the business of selling supercomputing cluster (IBM, Cray). If you are a consumer or build to consume internally, you would care less.
- Cloud computing is not a supercomputer. Different architecture, bandwitch, interconnectivity and latencies.by iberator
- Also, would those 550k Blackwell have good FP64 performance? How would one even compare them?by ziofill
- I’ve worked on several systems that had enough flop/s to make it in the top 5-10, but for which we never submitted benchmarks. Sometimes their backend network layout technically would make them several smaller clusters for an HPL run, sometimes it’s because the cluster is too heterogeneous to get a good benchmark result, and sometimes it’s because the employer wants to keep a low profile.
Most of the time, it just that it’s a hassle. It takes a while to prep and tune a big hero run for benchmarking, and if you spend a billion dollars on a cluster, it’s making you a lot more than that. Taking it down for a day or two stops the money printers.
by davidmr