[ Thanks to Vaz
for this link. ]
“It’s official: China’s next supercomputer, the
petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with
home-grown microprocessors. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the
Loongson (also known as “Godson”) family of CPUs at the Institute
of Computing Technology (ICT), a division of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, also confirms that the supercomputer will run Linux. This
is a sharp departure from China’s last supercomputer, the Dawning
5000a, which debuted at number 11 on the list of the world’s
fastest supercomputers in 2008, and was built with AMD chips and
ran Windows HPC Server.“The arrival of Dawning 6000 will be an important landmark for
the Loongson processor family, which to date has been used only in
inexpensive, low-power netbooks and nettop PCs. When the Dawning
5000a was initially announced, it too was meant to be built with
Loongson processors, but the Dawning Information Industry Company,
which built the computer, eventually went with AMD chips, citing a
lack of support for Windows, and the ICT’s failure to deliver a
sufficiently powerful chip in time.”