A Chinese supercomputer just secured first place on the Top500 list for the first time since 2017: Here’s everything we know about LineShine
The Shenzhen-based LineShine supercomputer pushes El Capitan and co further down the rankings
Chinese supercomputer LineShine has secured the number one spot on the 2026 Top500 list, marking the second from the country to take first place since Sunway TaihuLight in 2017.
The rankings, which were announced today at ISC26 in Hamburg, mean LineShine ends El Capitan’s run as the number one supercomputer.
Housed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS), LineShine was built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Centre.
The cluster is composed of around 14 million Arm-based cores, and recorded a debut measurement of 2.198 Exaflop/s on the HPL benchmark.
That marks a 20% performance boost compared to El Capitan, the organization noted, which comes in at 1.809 exaflops.
El Capitan, Frontier, Aurora, and JUPITER Booster all remain high on the list, occupying the second through to fifth spots on the Top500. This means three of the top five are still housed in the United States.
Under the hood of LineShine
LineShine is based on the ‘LingKun’ platform, which boasts 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz. The system also used the proprietary LingQi interconnect along with the Kylin operating system.
The developers behind the LX2 processor have not been disclosed by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Centre, however, analysis from Jon Peddie Research earlier this year described it as ‘Huawei's LX2’ - suggesting involvement by the tech giant.
While LineShine secured first place on the HPL benchmark, it also bagged the number one spot based on the HPCG ranking, recording 22 Petaflop/s.
The HPCG (high-performance conjugate gradient) ranking system is an alternative supercomputer benchmark which measures real-world performance, including internal data transfer speeds and memory subsystems.
HPL, by contrast, measures peak computational speeds.
Elsewhere, on the HPL-MxP benchmark, LineShine debuted in fourth place at 7.92 Exaflop/s. Top500 attributed its “modest” performance on this front to its CPU-only design.
A CPU-based supercomputer?
As Tom’s Hardware reported earlier this year, LineShine’s CPU-only design is rare, with the system among only a handful of supercomputers that don’t rely on accelerator chips such as GPUs or APUs.
Fugaku, developed by Riken and Fujitsu, for example, features a CPU-only architecture.
A key factor here could lie in US-imposed chip bans on Chinese manufacturers, the publication noted.
“The list demonstrates that there is no single dominant technology path to leadership-class computing,” Top500 said in a statement. “Instead, vendors are pursuing a variety of CPU, GPU, APU, and custom-accelerator approaches coupled with different interconnect and system designs.”
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