China has taken the world’s fastest supercomputer crown for the first time since 2017. LineShine from the nation’s National Supercomputer Center hit 2.198 Exaflops of performance, beating the previous champ El Capitan (1.809 Exaflops), located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA. Lineshine, a previously unlisted machine, is the first supercomputer to exceed two exaflops of “sustained double-precision performance using CPUs only,” according to Top500.org. 

China’s new machine was able to beat its US counterpart despite technology embargoes because it doesn’t rely on GPUs like other leading models. Instead, it’s designed around a custom 304-core processor, with 13.79 million cores running at 1.55GHz and linked by a proprietary interconnect. It draws around 42.2 megawatts of power, for an efficiency of 52.07 Gigaflops per watt. “It’s an impressive system,” Top500 organizer Dr. Jack Dongarra told The New York Times. “They upped us by developing a system that is not reliant on GPUs.

Though China managed to seize the top spot, the new ranking now boasts five systems beating the exascale threshold, with one in China, three in the US and one in Germany. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier moves to No. 3 at 1.353 Exaflop while Aurora, at Argonne National Laboratory, holds No. 4 at 1.012 Exaflops. Jupiter Booster, at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre moves to No. 5 at exactly one Exaflop.

Top500 noted a great deal of architectural diversity with this year’s list, with different supercomputer models using Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and other architecture. “There is no single dominant technology path to leadership-class computing; instead, vendors are pursuing a variety of CPU, GPU, APU, and custom-accelerator approaches,” Top500 wrote.

China has often kept its supercomputer designs under guard due to government restrictions. However, LineShine was developed without public funding, so its designers felt that they could submit it to Top500’s tests without issue, according to the NYT. The company didn’t reveal certain details like which company manufactured the CPUs or the type of chip technology used.