China builds world’s fastest supercomputer without U.S. chip

[Chuckt]

China builds world’s fastest supercomputer without U.S. chips

There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops, according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers. It is the first system to exceed 100 petaflops. A petaflop equals one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second.

TaihuLight is running "sizeable applications," which include advanced manufacturing, earth systems modeling, life science and big data applications, said Dongarra. This "shows that the system is capable of running real applications and [is] not just a stunt machine," Dongarra said.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/30 ... chips.html

[brad]

Interesting read.

I wonder what the speed difference would have been if they had been allowed to use U.S. chips?

[Chuckt]

I suppose if they switched from DDR3 memory to DDR4 memory, some processes could be 50% faster.

[brad]

That's one problem with technology isn't it. As soon as you've built it, it is already out of date!

I read somewhere recently that we are living in the exponential revolution. So things are getting more advanced on a very steep non-linear curve however to be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing things slow down a bit. For example, I use a mac and apple seems to think I need a new operating system each year! I think i'd be perfectly happy with upgrading my OS maybe every 10 years. I think windows XP is still a perfectly useable operating system and that's 15 years old!

[jacobcarl]

Actually More than america China is more advance in Technologies it no surprise in developing chip of their own. China and japan got more intelligent brain

[Chuckt]

Japan bought the processor that a lot of cell phones run on. Can you imagine someone doing this in an all cash deal?

SoftBank to buy UK chip designer ARM in $32 billion cash deal

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-arm-h ... SKCN0ZY03B

[brad]

32 Billion Dollars, wow!

You would have to be one very profitable company to have that kind of cash!

[Chuckt]

32 Billion Dollars, wow!

You would have to be one very profitable company to have that kind of cash!

Their name came up in the news today so they have a lot of cash although they might have less after these two deals.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... obile-deal