China and AMD win the ranking of supercomputers

    Yesterday, the 34th ranking of the world's top 500 most powerful supercomputers was published , in which a number of changes occurred. The total capacity of the 500 best supercomputers in the world for six months increased from 22.6 to 27.6 petaflops. And the leader changed: the Jaguar supercomputer (1.76 petaflops) came out on top after an upgrade at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

    For the first time, the Chinese top ten supercomputer also made it to the Top 500, with fifth place immediately. The breakthrough was made by the Tianhe-1 machine (average performance 563.1 teraflops, peak - 1.2 petaflops) on a hybrid Intel-AMD basis. Here it is, the brainchild of China's National University of Defense Technology. A couple of weeks before the publication of the Top 500, the Chinese have already set their sights on the third place and announced



    that became the second country in the world to which the line of 1 petaflops obeyed. But they miscalculated hard on both points. Only fifth place took, and 1 petaflops was taken simultaneously with the Germans .

    The most powerful Russian computer " Lomonosov " (350 teraflops) is in 12th place.

    Another interesting fact: AMD has increased its advantage over its competitor Intel in the battle of the most productive systems. A small company owns three (!) First places in the Top 500, the fourth place is at IBM PowerPC, and the best system on Intel can boast only a modest fifth result.

    However, the giant takes in quantity: 80% of the supercomputers from the rating are made on the basis of Intel. Intel’s quantitative superiority looks rather strange, considering that AMD can make supercomputers much more powerful, and AMD processors, as you know, are cheaper than a competitor. Is this also possible without the “kickbacks” by which Intel is notorious in the mass market of PCs?

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