Recently The New York Times reported the following:
China Takes Supercomputer Crown From U.S. for First Time
Since 2017 (1/2)
A supercomputer in Shenzhen was declared the world’s
fastest. It uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose
chips called graphics processing units.
The NYT - By Don Clark - Reporting from San Francisco
June 23, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET
China took back a coveted computing crown from the United
States on Tuesday, ratcheting up a fierce technological competition that has
implications for science, national security and geopolitics.
LineShine, a massive computing system in Shenzhen, China, was declared the world’s fastest by a group of researchers using a set of standard tests for supercomputers. Besides raw speed, the system stood out because it uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units, which most high-end supercomputers rely on for heavy number crunching.
That underlying design could point to a better way to blend artificial intelligence with traditional scientific tasks, said Jack Dongarra, an organizer of the so-called Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Dr. Dongarra, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee, recently inspected the new machine, at the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center. LineShine’s test results were more than 20 percent faster than those of El Capitan, a system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that has topped a twice-yearly ranking of supercomputer performance since November 2024. China had not placed a machine at the top of the list since 2017.
“It’s an impressive system,” Dr. Dongarra said of LineShine. “They upped us by developing a system that is not reliant on GPUs.”
The new supercomputer adds to the race between China and the United States for technological supremacy. U.S. tech giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have developed leading A.I. models, while another American company, Nvidia, has become the world’s dominant supplier of A.I. chips. China has tried to innovate in different ways, with the Chinese start-up DeepSeek releasing a cutting-edge A.I. model last year using just a tiny fraction of specialized A.I. chips.
To prevent China from catching up, President Trump has imposed tariffs and at times placed limits on A.I. chip exports. But China’s use of standard microprocessors, which are known as CPUs, rather than GPUs to create an ultrafast supercomputer suggests a potential way to get around those roadblocks.
“The U.S. government should have stronger controls on the export and manufacturing of CPUs for the China market,” said Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. “It is a loophole in the current regulations.”
Supercomputers, a term for the largest machines dedicated to science, have been used since the 1960s for tasks like creating climate models, cracking codes and designing nuclear weapons. They typically use high-precision mathematics, expressing numbers with 64 bits of data.
Commercial A.I. systems from companies like Google and OpenAI, by contrast, can be even faster. They can use approximations for tasks such as identifying images or selecting the next word in a sentence, relying on what are known as four-bit and eight-bit numbers that allow the systems to make many simpler calculations at once.
“It is notable and impressive what China has done here, but they can’t hold a candle to these massive A.I. supercomputers that have been built by American A.I. labs” and others, Mr. Goodrich said.
(to be continued)
Translation
中國自2017年以來首次從美國手中奪得超級電腦王寶座（1/2）
深圳一台超級電腦被宣佈為世界上最快的超級電腦。它只使用標準微處理器，而不是被稱為圖形處理器（GPU）的專用晶片
週二，中國從美國手中奪回了夢寐以求的超級電腦之王的寶座，加劇了激烈的技術競爭，這場競爭對科學、國家安全和地緣政治都具有重要意義。
位於中國深圳的巨型計算系統「天翔」（LineShine）被一組研究人員使用一系列超級電腦標準測試方法宣佈為世界上最快的超級電腦。除了極快的速度外，該系統脫穎而出的另一個原因是它僅使用標準微處理器，而非大多數高階超級電腦用於繁重運算的專用晶片 - 圖形處理器（GPU）。
全球最強超級電腦Top500名單的組織者之一Jack Dongarra表示，這種底層設計或許能為人工智能與傳統科學任務的融合提供更好的途徑。
Dongarra博士是田納西大學電腦科學與電子工程系的教授，他最近在深圳雲端運算中心考察了這台新機器。 LineShine的測試結果比加州Lawrence Livermore國家實驗室的El Capitan系統快20%以上。 El Capitan自2024年11月以來一直穩居全球超級電腦效能榜首，該名單每半年更新一次。自2017年以來，中國就再也沒有超級電腦位居榜首。
Dongarra博士評價LineShine時說道: “這是一套令人印象深刻的系統” ， “他們開發了一套不依賴GPU的系統，超越了我們。”
這台新的超級電腦加劇了中美兩國在科技領域的競爭。美國科技巨擘如OpenAI、Anthropic和Google已開發出領先的人工智能模型，而另一家美國公司英偉達則成為全球人工智能晶片的主要供應商。中國則嘗試以不同的方式進行創新，例如，中國新創公司DeepSeek去年發佈了一款尖端人工智能模型，該模型僅使用了極少量的專用人工智能晶片。
為了阻止中國迎頭趕上，特朗普總統曾對人工智能晶片加徵關稅，並一度限制其出口。但中國使用標準微處理器（即CPU）而非GPU來製造超高速超級電腦，這表明中國可能找到了繞過這些障礙的方法。
加州大學全球衝突與合作研究所 高級研究員吉Jimmy Goodrich表示:“美國政府應該加強對中國市場CPU出口和製造的管控” ;“這是現有法規中的一個漏洞。”
超級電腦，即專門用於科學研究的最大型機器，自 20 世紀 60 年代以來就被用於創建氣候模型、破解密碼和設計核武器等任務。它們通常使用高精度數學運算，以 64 位元資料表示數字。
相比之下，Google和 OpenAI 等公司的商業人工智能系統速度更快。它們可以使用近似值來完成諸如識別圖像或選擇句子中的下一個單字等任務，依賴所謂的 4 位和 8 位數字，這使得系統能夠即時進行許多較簡單的計算。
Goodrich先生說: 「中國在這方面取得的成就令人矚目，但與美國人工智能實驗室和其他國家建造的這些巨型人工智能超級電腦相比，它們根本無法相提並論」。
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