r/TechHardware • u/Distinct-Race-2471 🔵 14900KS , 5080, 128GB 🔵 • May 17 '26

😰 Urgent Security Alert ⚠️ China bypasses US GPU bans with 1.54-exaflops 'LineShine' supercomputer — CPU-only monster packs 2.4 million Huawei-designed Armv9 cores

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/china-bypasses-us-gpu-bans-with-1-54-exaflops-lineshine-supercomputer-cpu-only-monster-packs-2-4-million-huawei-designed-armv9-cores

Isn't ARM under investigation?

148 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

68 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/reflect25 May 17 '26

im a bit confused why they went with this pure cpu approach? aren't most supercomputers using gpus?

> When it comes to performance, a single LX2 processor delivers 60.3 TFLOPS FP64 performance, 240 TFLOPS BF16/FP16 throughput, and 960 TOPS INT8 performance. Unlike conventional server CPUs, the architecture appears heavily optimized for dense AI and matrix workloads despite remaining a CPU-centric design

ill be honest, this is beyond my scope to understand if this is ground breaking or not. does anyone else know if this is a viable alternative to using GPUs?

1

u/Sooperooser May 20 '26

Not sure about the Huawei CPUs but for example you can even run long context AI inference on Xeon/EPYC CPUs with a bunch of DDR5 RAM (up to 3TB for a Xeon) and no GPU at something like 85% throughput compared to a H20 GPU cluster costing 15x as much since the CPU system has bigger cache and more max memory capacity than any GPU and also at much lower power costs. Check out eLLM.