A new supercomputer from China has topped the latest list of the world's most powerful machines.
The 93 petaflop Sunway TaihuLight is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi.
At its peak, the computer can perform around 93,000 trillion calculations per second.
It is twice as fast and three times as efficient as the previous leader Tianhe-2, also from China, said Top500 which released the new list on Monday.
Its main applications include advanced manufacturing, weather forecasting and big data analytics, wrote Jack Dongarra in a paper about the new machine.
It has more than 10.5 million locally-made processing cores and 40,960 nodes and runs on a Linux-based operating system.
Its greatest feat yet is managing to run Dishonored 2 at a steady 60 FPS on medium settings.
At this point, is it really that impressive when modern "computers" are actually more like a shitton of separate computers except networked/integrated together? If your PC has a quad core and a GPU, you don't have a computer; you have five computers in the same case.
So it's not a supercomputer. It's >10.5 million baby computers under the same roof.
Dylan Torres
...
Jack Wood
Agreed.
David Hall
Networking at the scale of supercomputers is far from simple. It isn't just plugging all machines together. All supercomputers are made of several "baby" computers, often with GPUs or other accelerators. Sunway is kinda funny that China wanted to use Intel CPUs but the US didn't allow the sale. China made their own CPUs instead, so all the block did was cost Intel sales.
Angel White
Are you implying he's wrong, mate?
James Green
Are there like really good CPUs that I'd have to smuggle out of China? Or are the USA's still top?
Sebastian Hughes
really?
Parker Gray
too bad
Dominic Richardson
Can it play Crysis 3?
Cooper Brown
China has nothing close to Nvidia's GPUs, they're still in the lead. Sunway doesn't use GPUs, but CPUs. The catch is they're not x86 (Intel/AMD) CPUs, but a new microarchitecture. They're supposedly not very easy to code for (they don't automatically cache memory for fast access…), so I don't know if they could have a place in the consumer market.
James Collins
Wow! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
William Morales
Can it calculate how big my dick is?
Jose Ramirez
How could Bethesda fuck up a game this bad?
Justin Morris
I'm implying he's missing the point.
Brayden Carter
It's not a matter of being wrong or right, it's a matter of making a stupid statement or not.
What they are using probably isn't particularly good for the uses you might end up giving to a CPU in your regular day-to-day life.
Bentley Cruz
How fucking new are you?
Daniel Torres
everytime
Lucas Brooks
That's what supercomputers have always been. The interconnects are what separates supercomputers from clusters.
Gavin Butler
but can it run crysis and explode a milloin barrels XDDD
