China plans CPU-only exascale supercomputer with 47,000 homemade processors, record 2 Exaflops of performance without GPUs — Lingshen super said to use Huawei Kunpeng servers and no foreign-made components
China's National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen has announced the Lingshen supercomputer, a CPU-only exascale system aiming for over 2 ExaFLOPS using 47,000 domestic processors and no foreign components. The system will reportedly use Huawei Kunpeng servers and avoid GPUs, differing from other exascale machines globally. It is planned to include 92 compute cabinets, over 650PB of storage, and a million-port interconnect. The project remains unproven, with no timeline or supplier details confirmed, and faces skepticism due to reliance on unverified domestic x86 CPUs.
- ▪Lingshen is designed to achieve sustained performance of over 2 ExaFLOPS using only CPUs, making it the first proposed exascale system without GPU accelerators.
- ▪The system will integrate 47,000 homemade processors across 92 compute cabinets and use Huawei Kunpeng servers based on Arm and potentially x86 architectures.
- ▪China claims the supercomputer will use no foreign-made components, though its use of x86 CPUs raises questions due to limited domestic options like Zhaoxin and Hygon.
- ▪The full system is expected to feature 650PB of storage, 36 network cabinets, and liquid-cooled infrastructure with 10 TB/s bandwidth.
- ▪No benchmark results or deployment timeline exist yet, and experts remain skeptical about the feasibility of the performance claims.
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Tech Industry China announces CPU-only exascale supercomputer with 47,000 homemade processors, record 2 Exaflops of performance without GPUs — Lingshen super said to use Huawei Kunpeng servers and no foreign-made components News By Luke James published 28 April 2026 Good luck with that. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: National Supercomputing Center, Shenzen) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter China's National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen announced the Lingshen supercomputer project at a conference on April 24, targeting sustained performance above 2 ExaFLOPS using only CPUs and no foreign-made components.The system would pack 47,000 processors into 92 compute cabinets, making it the first exascale machine designed to reach that performance tier without GPU accelerators. Lu Yutong, director of the Shenzhen supercomputing center and the system's chief designer, presented the technical details at the event.Every other exascale system in operation relies heavily on GPUs or accelerator hardware. The U.S. Department of Energy's El Capitan, currently the world's fastest supercomputer, runs on 44,544 AMD MI300A APUs that tightly couple CPU and GPU silicon on a single package. Lingsheng’s CPU-only architecture would represent a fundamentally different approach to reaching exascale throughput.Article continues below You may like Huawei unveils new "Atlas 350" AI accelerator with 1.56 PFLOPS of FP4 compute & up to 112 GB of HBM China-made Loongson 12-core chip is approximately three times slower than six-core Ryzen 5 9600X Arm to sell its new AGI CPU in China The project is split into a pilot verification phase and a full production system, with the pilot using 100 Huawei Kunpeng servers built on Arm-based Taishan cores, totaling 12,800 cores. The production system scales to 1,580 blade servers using x86 CPUs with 101,120 cores and a theoretical peak above 10 petaflops. 16 four-way servers could add another 2,048 cores, and four eight-way servers could contribute a further 1,280, based on a machine translation of Chinese-language press materials.The full system would include 36 network cabinets supporting a million-port interconnect, 650PB of planned storage across 428 nodes, and 67 liquid-cooled storage cabinets with 10 TB/s of bandwidth.Lingsheng's claimed sustained performance of 2+ ExaFLOPS would, if achieved, exceed El Capitan's measured Linpack score of 1.809 ExaFLOPS. While El Capitan's theoretical peak is 2.79 ExaFLOPS, real-world Linpack results are always lower. Obviously, no Linpack or equivalent benchmark data exists for Lingsheng because the system hasn’t been built yet.China’s claims are at best dubious. On a literal reading of the announcement, China says it might be able to achieve 2+ ExaFLOPS at some point in the future. But El Capitan is already theoretically capable of 2.79 ExaFLOPS, so it’s difficult to see how China’s project is ever going to "cast a new benchmark for global supercomputing," when it’s unlikely to be running even five years from now. window.sliceComponents = window.sliceComponents || {}; externalsScriptLoaded.then(() => { window.reliablePageLoad.then(() => { var componentContainer =…
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