One of everlasting legacies from former President of The United States (POTUS) Mr. Barrack Obama will be the creation of Chinese semiconductor industry. Following the ban on completion of Tianhe-2 supercomputer in 2014, Chinese government did not double down, but decided to put semiconductor industry as one of top 3 national priorities, and started to infuse over a quarter of trillion U.S. dollars, i.e. 2 trillion RMB (Yuan) into the domestic semiconductor industry, creating not a train, but a “Hyperloop Express” that is changing the semiconductor industry landscape. First, we’re starting to see the power of homegrown computers with ShenWei 260-core CPU processors powering the
China Now Leads the Server Race: Meet the Phytium MARS Processor
Two decades ago, the US high end microprocessor industry was a lively, diverse market where about five various instruction set architectures battled it out across the workstation and server fields. You had choices like DEC’s Alpha – the speed leader; MIPS – the Silicon Graphics heart; SPARC from Sun Microsystems, IBM POWER, HP PA, the nascent X86, and a few custom architectures for MPP massive parallel processing, for instance. The rest of the world pretty much had nothing – British Transputer and German Hyperstone platforms died out due to lack of funding, while ARM was still keeping to the low end embedded arena after the end of the
USA Embargo Cannot Stop China: Tianhe-2 Supercomputer Keeps #1
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
US Government Gives Intel Two Supercomputer Wins
While Intel may have lost some serious income from being virtually shut out of Intel’s HPC market, the US government has recently handed the company two impressive supercomputer wins.
Uncle Sam Shocks Intel With a Ban on Xeon Supercomputers in China
Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opened the regular staff meeting before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 conference, in Shenzhen, China – it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business. Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers with their mixed architectures – Tianhe-2 is a fully Intel based machine, the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators. Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70% discount on its processors and accelerators, it
Jack Dongarra: China Isn’t the Emerging HPC Power You Think It Is
In an exclusive interview with VR World, Jack Dongarra of Oak Ridge National Laboratory says we need to take a second look at certain countries’ claims of rising HPC power — notably China.
