Chinas Lineshine came out of nowhere to grab title of most powerful computer in the known universe

Date:
Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:02:30 +0000

Description:
"Intelligent splendor or brightness" uses Arm CPU only to unexpectedly
surpass US rivals.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg was the perfect platform for Lineshine (or Lngshng )
to, well, shine, as it received the crown of the worlds most powerful
computer ever built.

It smashed the previous TOP500 record held by El Capitan , the US supercomputer built in 2024 by HPE for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Unlike the latter, Lineshine uses CPU power only rather than APU or GPUs, a remarkable feat given the prevalence of these technologies. Only another supercomputer in the top 10, the Arm -powered Fugaku supercomputer, falls in that category. Latest Videos From Watch full video here:

Details shared by Lu Yutong, the chief designer of Lineshine show that it is powered by more than 13.7 million ARMv9 cores spread over 90 racks and 45,360 CPUs.

Yes, youve got it right, there are 304 cores per socket split in two
chiplets, and eight NUMA domains each with 38 cores and 4GB HBM memory.
Theres apparently eight CPU slots left empty per rack. You may like China unveils a CPU-only supercomputer capable of 1.54 exaflops Chinas Lingsheng supercomputer uses CPU-only architecture to reach exascale speeds Arm introduces its first in-house AGI CPU with backing from Meta and OpenAI

Each socket can access 256GB of DDR5 memory, which means that the entire system has 128TB off-package RAM and 16TB HBM. The entire supercomputer has 11.6PB of traditional DDR5 memory and almost 1.5PB of HBM.

Compared to El Capitan pure HBM3 approach, Lineshine opted for a tiered
memory pool similar to traditional computers (using RAM and SSD). The system is connected to 200PB of direct storage as well. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Breathtaking performance Altogether, Lineshine reached 2.198 exaflops, 21% faster than the 1.809 exaflop figure reached by El Capitan.

However numbers dont tell the whole story; Chinas new top dog consumes far more power than El Capitan, making it far less efficient. It only reached 52 Gigaflops/Watt compared to 60.95 Gigaflops for El Capitan and 73.28 for Kairos, the greenest supercomputer in operation.

What is more interesting is the fact that each core, even running at 1.5GHz, reached about 200 Gigaflops of FP64. Significantly more than any supercomputing CPU Core (e.g. AMD Zen 4 or Nvidia Grace) which ironically underlines Chinese weakness when it comes to GPU, i.e they went the CPU way because they didnt have any option than to go brute-force. What to read next China wants to spend nearly $300 billion on a national data center grid HP packs 81,920 CPU cores, up to 1.28PB RAM into one 42U rack using 80
multi-node motherboards This tiny AMD PC just ran a massive 397B AI Model
that required a server room full of GPUs a year ago

And thats despite the barrage of launches by Huawei over the past few years with the Ascend 910D , the Ascend 910C and the Ascend 920 .

Lineshine used its own version of Nvidias Nvlink interconnect called LinQi, one that can scale in excess of 100,000 nodes or more than 60 million cores, 4x the current core count. So theres plenty of room to grow should Lineshine want to keep its rank.

It is not the first time that China sits atop the TOP500 leaderboard. The
last time it achieved it was with the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer back in 2017. And while nabbing the top spot on this leaderboard gets the winner bragging rights, it is only really useful for HPC (high performance
computing) applications like CFD, earthquake simulation, materials, energy, drug design, neuroscience and scientific AI, and others.

Hyperscalers like Google or Microsoft can muster even more powerful compute power, by at least an order of magnitude, if needed but that is not accounted for by TOP500 for various reasons. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.



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