China has taken the world's fastest supercomputer title for the first time since 2017, as reported by Engadget.
China's LineShine from the National Supercomputer Center hit 2.198 Exaflops of performance, beating the previous champion El Capitan (1.809 Exaflops), located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US of A. China's Lineshine is the first supercomputer to exceed two exaflops of "sustained double-precision performance using CPUs only".
China's new machine reached the top, because it doesn't rely on GPUs like other leading models. Instead, it's designed around a custom 304-core processor, with 13.79 million cores running at 1.55 GHz and linked by a proprietary interconnect. It draws around 42.2 megawatts of power, for an efficiency of 52.07 Gigaflops per watt.
This new top ranking has five systems beating the exascale threshold: 1 in China, 3 in the US and 1 in Germany.