utopiah , 11 hours ago

“brute force is brute force” what a strange thing to say, it precisely is NOT.

If you have a lot of processors but they are poorly linked together, i.e low bandwidth, then they are NOT more powerful. That’s why e.g NVIDIA is selling InfiniBand and other very expensive solutions to datacenter.

Sure a supercomputer might have more CPU/GPU/etc than another but it doesn’t make it automatically more powerful, in term of what can actually be computed in comparable time (and arguably energy consumption).

That being said, China might be secretly #1 on TOP500 but until evidence of it is provided, I’m not sure what’s the point of such speculation is.