alt Hacker NewsTOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer
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> Why aren’t these AI companies submitting to the TOP500 to show off their computing prowess?
my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list
It's just poker, they didn't want to tip their hand
TOP500 hasn't been a particularly useful measure of practical computing power in modern systems for many years because what it measures isn't a significant bottleneck in most real systems. It has become a measure of how much money someone is willing to spend for bragging rights. (HPCG is better in that it is a bit more bandwidth focused but still pretty narrow.)
Most companies with huge systems don't participate.
You can see the list yourself at https://top500.org/
I haven't kept up with the latest on supercomputing power, but I recall some years ago there being strong evidence that China had a couple of un-announced supercomputers that would have topped the charts. It makes me wonder what is publicly disclosed vs. actual.
Interesting to see PAC mentioned on the slide, I'd have assumed security features would be a waste of transistors on something so compute-optimized - but maybe they want to isolate workloads from each other?
> We think it is highly likely that these LX2 chiplets are etched using SMIC 7 nanometer processes at the N+3 refinement, and we base that on the fact that the chip only runs at 1.55 GHz. That is nowhere near the 3 GHz that SMIC can push with that process, but it is probably lower to get the memory and core speeds more balanced. [1]
Based on the ARMv9.2.
[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/hpc/2026/06/25/a-deep-dive-on-c...
Extremely impressive accomplishment considering they did this with Chinese interconnects and Chinese chips. This is a wake up call.
Why are they not using GPUs? is it use cases that don't suit GPUs or because of the limitations they are imposing on themselves to use SMIC domestic chips?
> Two cores are disabled per cluster.
I’m sure there is a good reason for this, which is..?
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48658334
Would the AI “GW-scale” clusters be able to run the Top500 benchmarks meaningfully? And what might be the outcome?
Just glad to see Hamburg mentioned :) Hope you all didn’t suffer too much through the current heatwave
Is it the first to reach 2 exaflops?
How many tokens/s? :)
And you know it needs a well-conceived OS to be able to run it: it's got to be... Microsoft Windows right?
The OS powering 0% of the 500 supercomputers of the Top 500. But this time, it has to be Windows, right? Amirite?
Ah, no, just kidding: it's "Kylin OS". It used to be a BSD derivative and now it's just based on Linux.
I know, I know: "It's a heavily modified Linux". Whatever, it's not Windows and that makes me very happy.