China creates supercomputer with its own microprocessor

Posted by newbie Saturday, December 24, 2011 0 comments

Posted by Costea Lestoc on November 2, 2011, filed in: Computer Gadgets

Previously, China stunned the world when it announced Tianhe-1A, the world fastest supercomputer which beat the US �Jaguar� supercomputer by almost a mighty 0.8 petaflops or 800 trillion floating point calculations per second. Now, the communist country announced a new supercomputer which didn�t beat the Tianhe-1A but is nonetheless significant. This new supercomputer is called Sunway BlueLight MPP supercomputer.

What is interesting about Sunway is that none of the microprocessor in it is done by major companies such as Intel or AMD but rather its own microprocessors developed by the Chinese themselves. To compare, the Tianhe-1A uses a combination of Intel Xeon CPU and NVIDIA GPU. With this, it means that the Chinese are one step closer to compete with major markets and potentially be a competitor to the giants Intel and AMD.

The rate on which China is catching up technologically is alarmingly fast. It took 20 years for the microprocessors in the US to be what they are today but experts predict that the same will not be said with China. The microprocessors will be available not only for supercomputers but also for normal usage such as on a desktop or laptop. Should it be available en masse, expect a lot of computers to run on these microprocessors as well.