The modern world's supercomputers operate out in the open, as countries brag about their performance and enter them into standardized benchmarking competitions to prove their engineering chops. China doesn't play this game, however. Its entire supercomputer program is mostly kept secret because it's not supposed to have access to advanced technology. Despite its desire to keep its cards close to its vest, it recently announced a new supercomputer that could break the exascale barrier—all while using homegrown CPUs, which shouldn't be possible under the sanctions levied against it.
The new supercomputer is named Tianhe Xingyi, state news agency Xinhua reports (via Reuters). The release is unsurprisingly vague since China doesn't release numbers or hard info. It states only that it was built with "domestic advanced computing architecture, high-performance multi-core processors, high-speed interconnection networks, and large-scale storage." The release says that compared with Tianhe-2 (above), China has doubled many aspects of its performance. That's unsurprising, as Tianhe-2 first debuted on the Top500 list in 2013 and was the world's fastest supercomputer for several years after that, only being displaced by TaihuLight, another computer from China in 2016.
What's notable here is Tianhe-2 used 32,000 Intel Xeon 12 core processors, but this new system uses silicon made in China. As Tom's Hardware notes, the new supercomputer could be the third iteration of Tianhe, which was supposed to launch in 2019 with 1.7 exaflops of computing power. This new computer reportedly is equipped with MT3000 processors, according to The Next Platform, but no details exist yet on how many were used, how many cores they offer, and so forth. They're believed to be multi-core Armv8 Phytium 2000+ CPUs and the Matrix 2000+ (MTP) processor node/architecture.
We'll have to wait a bit to find out what this machine is packing in firepower. China no longer submits its systems to the Top500 list like the rest of the world to keep its efforts somewhat mysterious, but it does submit them for Gordon Bell prizes. It will likely offer this new system for the award next year, where we'll see how it compares against US supercomputers such as the newest Intel-based system named Aurora and the current leader, AMD's exascale Frontier system at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
