[Info-vax] Sunway TaihuLight is the fastest supercomputer in the world

[Neil Rieck]

On Tuesday, June 21, 2016 at 12:14:33 PM UTC-4, Gianluca Bonetti wrote:
> Hello Digital Folks!
> 
> I have read today about the latest supercomputer, named Sunway TaihuLight.
> http://top500.org/system/178764
> 
> It is based on non-commercial CPU chips, named SW26010, which in turn is the latest in ShenWei architecture.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW26010
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShenWei
> 
> Wikipedia page about ShenWei architecture points out that there are many similarities between ShenWei and Alpha.
> Could have been HP to build such a computer made out of Alpha chips, but they bet on Itanium.
> And inkjet cartridges.
> And glossy paper.
> 
> Bye
> gl

Not sure I would agree with your comparisons to either Alpha or Itanium. For example, Alpha (a superscaler RISC) was never multi-core. On the flip side, the latest Itanium2 (95xx series Poulson) CPU chip sports 8 cores. (software sees 16 processors if hyper-threading is enabled). but focusing only on multicore is an oversimplification.

Anyway, the new Chinese designed and manufactured SW26010 product sports a 260-core design. This article contains a little more technical information:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/230458-meet-the-new-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-chinas-taihulight

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/