China assumed the role of fastest supercomputer in the world with LineShine, a machine that debuted directly in first place on the TOP500 list of June 2026. The system knocked the American El Capitan from the top, a position that the United States had occupied since the end of 2024.
The result is not an isolated allegation from Beijing. It was measured and audited by TOP500, the biannual ranking that classifies the most powerful computers on the planet, released during the ISC conference in Hamburg.
LineShine, number 1 without any GPU
LineShine has achieved 2,198 exaflops in HPL (High Performance Linpack), the test used by TOP500. This equates to around 2.2 quintillion calculations per second, around 80% of the theoretical peak of 2.736 exaflops.
The most unusual point is in the architecture, it is the first system in the ranking to cross the 2 exaflops mark using CPUs onlywithout any video card. Most high-end supercomputers rely on graphics accelerators to get close to this number.
The machine is located at the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center and was built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center. It also leads the HPCG ranking, aimed at loads closer to real applications, with 22 petaflops.
How China assembled the machine
LineShine is all home technology: it’s about 45 thousand LX2 processorseach with 304 cores at 1.55 GHz, totaling 13.79 million cores in total. The basis is the Chinese LingKun platform.
Communication between the parts uses the proprietary LingQi interconnection, high speed and low latency, and the operating system is Kylin, also Chinese. There is not a single Western hardware component in the configuration.
The choice for common CPUs has a political reason. In front of American restrictions to the sale of chips from companies like NVIDIA, and the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, China got around the blockade by investing in more affordable and home-made processors. The message for the United States is direct.
This is the first time a CPU-only computer has reached exascale
Jack Dongarra, co-founder of TOP500 and winner of the Turing Award
El Capitan drops to second
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s El Capitan came in second with 1.809 exaflops. LineShine therefore opens up an advantage of more than 20% over the former leader.
The American machine uses AMD Instinct MI300A APUs, which combine CPU and GPU in the same package, and serves the United States’ nuclear program. The country still dominates the ranking in volume, with three of the top five positions.
There is, however, a clear cost to Chinese leadership: efficiency. LineShine consumes 42.2 MWcompared to around 29.7 MW for El Capitan. It is faster, but uses a lot more energy to do so.
| Position | System | Country | HPL |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | LineShine | China | 2,198 exaflops |
| 2 | El Capitan | United States | 1.809 exaflops |
| 3 | Frontier | United States | 1.353 exaflops |
| 4 | Aurora | United States | 1.012 exaflops |
| 5 | JUPITER Booster | Germany | 1,000 exaflops |
The caveat of artificial intelligence
The title of fastest has an important caveat: LineShine leads the Linpack, but it is not the strongest machine for artificial intelligence.
AI payloads rely on GPUs and mixed-precision calculations. In the HPL-MxP benchmark, which measures precisely this, LineShine appears only in fourth placewith 7.92 exaflops. El Capitan remains first on this list.
It is also worth remembering that cloud giants, such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google, rarely submit their systems to the TOP500. Most data centers focused on artificial intelligence would be left out of the comparison, even though they are extremely powerful.
Also read:
- Lingshen: China bets on supercomputer without GPUs and achieves record performance of 2 exaflops
- AMD takes first and second place on the list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world
- Ironwood: Google’s AI chip outperforms the best supercomputer by 24 times
China returns to the TOP500 after years of absence
The victory has an extra weight of context. China had stopped reporting its systems to the TOP500 years ago, even though it operated well-known exascale supercomputers such as the Sunway OceanLight and Tianhe-3. LineShine marks the country’s return to the list, and straight to first place.
The achievement takes on another dimension when looking at recent history. In April, the same Shenzhen center presented the Lingshen project, with the target of 2 exaflops with CPUs alone. At the time, experts asked for skepticism, as there was no benchmark, just a project promise.
Two months later, the promise became an audited number. It was the first time that a Chinese system topped the TOP500 since the Sunway TaihuLightin 2017, and the first time in history that a machine reaches exascale without using a single GPU.
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Source: www.adrenaline.com.br
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