Chinese Society of Computer Science has published a list of the Top 100 highest-performing supercomputers in the country, but the country’s intentional obfuscation of its true computing power seems to have been taken to a new level. Just like last year, Chinese entities were too cautious to include their alleged ExaFLOPS-class supercomputers in the list. However, even more surprising is that the list contains no new systems. The only difference between the 2023 and 2024 Top 100 lists of China’s most powerful supercomputers is their cumulative power, which indicates minor upgrades. Likely, Chinese entities are deliberately withholding information about their most powerful systems to avoid provoking more restrictions from the U.S. government.

China’s Top 3 supercomputers in 2024 are the same heterogeneous CPU + GPU systems that topped the list in 2023. The range-topping machine in the official list was deployed in 2023; it features 15,974,400 CPU cores and a maximum Linpack performance of 487.94 PFLOPS. The machine is more powerful than Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer (442 FP64 PetaFLOPS), but it lags significantly behind American ExaFLOPS-class machines El Capitan (1.742 ExaFLOPS), Frontier (1.353 ExaFLOPS), and Aurora (1.012 ExaFLOPS). 

The second highest-performing supercomputer in China was launched in 2022, it has 460,000 CPU cores, and a maximum Linpack performance of 208.26 PFLOPS. The third most powerful machine in China (well, officially) is a system with 285,000 CPU cores and a maximum Linpack performance of 125.04 PFLOPS. 

The difference in the aggregated performance of China’s official Top 100 lists of supercomputers in 2023 and 2024 is negligible. Back in 2023, they offered an aggregated compute power of 1.398 ExaFLOPS, whereas in 2024, their performance increased to 1.406 ExaFLOPS. 

However, the official Top 100 list of supercomputers may not accurately reflect China’s supercomputing capabilities. Jack Dongarra, a supercomputer industry luminary and co-founder of Top500.org, last year said that China has at least three ExaFLOPS-class machines with performance ranging from 1.3 ExaFLOPS to 1.7 ExaFLOPS, powered by hardware designed in China, as well as a 2 ExaFLOPS machine featuring x86 processors from Hygon. This information has never been confirmed, but the words of Jack Dongarra are usually taken seriously by the industry. 

For China’s top-ranked supercomputers, the Chinese Society of Computer Science does not publish their exact specifications, possibly to obscure the suppliers of hardware for these systems. Analysts tend to be keen enough to figure out what hardware might be used and who can supply it. It is speculated that these machines are powered by industry-standard CPUs and GPUs, with most of their crucial components obtained through grey channels. Yet, there are systems in the Top 10 powered by China’s domestically developed processors and accelerators.

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.