Christopher Mims writes that China’s home-grown supercomputer based on the Godson chip could be the world’s most power-efficient on the TOP500 when it launches this summer. Known as the Dawning 6000, the 300 Teraflop system will comprise 3,000 low-power 1-Ghz, 8-core Godson 3B chips.
The absolute power of the machine might not matter much, however, because as the platform matures, performance per watt will become the dominant metric, as it has for all other high performance systems (and even the chips in your laptop and cell phone).
Mims goes on to say that has system architect Weiwu Hu has disclosed China’s plan to build a petascale supercomputer based on Godson sometime in the near future. Read the Full Story.
