China Expects to Compete with Intel, in 20 Years

China, which recently ascended to the top of the world's supercomputer powers, said that, by the end of this year, it will not be using foreign processors for its future supercomputers anymore.

Instead, the country intends to rely on its own Loongson series of processing cores.

The upcoming Dawning 6000 supercomputer is expected to use 10,000 of these chips to achieve an estimated 1 Petaflop of processing performance. While it is a national priority to use its own processors, scientists admitted that it is difficult at this time to exploit the full potential of the chips as there aren't programmers who can squeeze every bit of horsepower out of them.

China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer, currently the world's fastest supercomputer, uses a total of 186,368 cores and achieves a peak performance of 4.7 PFlops. The systems uses Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs as well as Nvidia Tesla GPUs.  

China expects that it will take at least 10 years until the chips will be able to supply the domestic market. In 20 years, China wants to compete with companies such as Intel here in the U.S.