Couple of months ago, we exclusively reported that the U.S. government blocked Intel from selling its products to Chinese supercomputer firms such as Inspur, responsible for building the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. Originally, Tianhe-2 was planned to expand all the way to almost 100,000 Xeon processors and Xeon Phi co-processors, targeting to beat the 100 PFLOPS barrier. Initial deployment included 4,096 Chinese Galaxy FT-1500 processors (Chinese SPARC) and 16,000 processor nodes with two 12-core Xeon E2692 processors and three Xeon Phi 31S1P co-processors for a grand total of 3.12 million cores. Full installation of Tianhe-2 was scheduled to feature 48,000 processor nodes, or 9.93 million cores. However, those
