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

China's National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen unveiled the Lingshen supercomputer project, aiming for over 2 ExaFLOPS performance using 47,000 homemade processors without GPUs or foreign components. The system, designed to surpass the current fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, would utilize Huawei Kunpeng servers and Arm-based Taishan cores. The project includes a pilot phase with 100 servers and a full production system with 1,580 blade servers. While China's claims of achieving 2+ ExaFLOPS are ambitious, questions remain about the feasibility of surpassing existing supercomputing benchmarks without GPUs or foreign-made CPUs.