China is not only the second largest economy in the world at the moment, trailing right behind the US at the moment, but the country also recently surprised high-performance US computing specialists as well by announcing the existence of the Sunway BlueLight MPP – a new supercomputer that was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, located in eastern China. The Sunway system is capable of performing up to 1,000 trillion calculations each second, where a petaflop will more or less place it among the 20 fastest computers in the world.
Not only that, this was made possible thanks to 8,700 or so ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors that were designed at a Chinese computer institute and manufactured in Shanghai. Talk about home grown! At the moment, it is said that the Chinese are around three generations behind the state-of-art chip making technologies that currently see action by world leaders including the US, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
Well, such developments from the world’s most populous country is something worth keeping an eye on – and at least it will keep the rest of the players on their toes in the quest to maintain their world rankings, don’t you think so?
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