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back to article China fires up homegrown petaflops super

The Chinese government has booted up the first of three homegrown, petaflops-class massively parallel supercomputers based on indigenous technology. The Sunway Bluelight – or Divinity Blue-Ray depending on how you want to translate its name from Chinese – is based on a 16-core processor, rumored to be a derivative of the DEC …

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  1. Reginald Reader
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    Cartoon fodder?

    "The Chinese government has booted up the first of three homegrown, petaflops-class massively parallel supercomputers based on indigenous technology..." has to be fodder for a cartoon involving China's famously huge population armed to the teeth with abaci.

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  2. Justin Clements
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    right....

    So a country in the slow lane for the last 100 years, puts together a questionable machine, with a questionable processor, with statistics that no doubt no one can corroborate, with an unknown switching later, that uses a fraction of the power that companies in the west have been constantly developing for the last 30 years.....

    Right....

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    1. mhenriday
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      FAIL

      Just continue to keep your head in the sand, Justin -

      after all, a country with huge reserves of intellectual talent that dominated world trade until 1850 and now is regaining its former place will never never be able to create anything worthwhile. Everything they do is, bien sûr, either fake, or due to piracy from the brilliant, but o so naive «West»....

      Henri

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Black Helicopters

      Ridiculous

      The fact that your post got rated -5 really speaks volumes about the quality of the commentators on this site. The theoretical floating point performance of a 16 core, 1.1GHz chip as used in this project is listed as 140.8 GFlops. For comparison, an 8 core POWER7 at 4.14 GHz has a rated theoretical performance of 264.96 GFlops. And no one even questions whether this is believable.

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  3. Vendicar Decarian1

    America is history

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  4. earplugs

    low! power! without! Intel!

    OMG, you mean SJ was right about power hog Intel not listening to the low power tune?

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    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge
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      Devil

      Yeah, like Alpha was not a power hog in its hayday

      Alpha was a powerhog beyond anything Intel produced in those days. As it was the only game in town in terms of 64 bit linux I had no choice but to use them despite the circa 100W CPU power consumption. While 100W does not sound a lot today, 12 years ago P3 ate 22W tops and K6 ate even less than that.

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      1. Roo
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        Stop

        Alpha a power hog, surely you jest...

        Nor was the Alpha the only 64 bit Linux game in town as of late 1999. AFAICT R4K support was rolled into the kernel around mid 1999 - although I'm pretty sure it was available outside of the mainstream Linux kernels before that...

        For the EV6 you might have a point... P3 Katmai core came out in 1999, at that stage the most power hungry Alpha was the EV6 and it ate 73W@600MHZ in 1999. Meanwhile the Katmai had a "TDP" of ~43W@600MHz, that said Intel's TDP figures are usually quite a bit smaller than the peak figures quoted by the rest of the industry at the time, so in reality the gap would have been a significantly smaller.

        Meanwhile the 1999 vintage EV5s were eating ~25W@666MHz, so the Katmai AND the EV6 look like the power hogs to me. ;)

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  5. Skymonrie
    Coat

    <The title ate my dog>

    As a westerner living in China, i can believe most of this story. China has a plan that says, within the next 5 years it will be the top tech manufacturer in the world; they have already made a lot of headway it must be said.

    Towns can pop up in about 3 months, from small hamlet to having 8 big factories. The government is pouring money in the right places and...in to officials pockets. Banks and lawyers are not Gods here like they are in England so things actually get done.

    I would highly recommend the British government start saying FU to financial services and start putting money in to research of tech again if we stand even half a chance...The one thing China doesn't have (just yet) is the level of universities we have in the west. Again though, start saying FU to so many marketing courses though.

    My two cents

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