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The International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg was the perfect platform for Lineshine (or Língshèng 灵晟) to, well, shine, as it received the crown of the world’s most powerful computer ever built.It smashed the previous TOP500 record held by El Capitan, the US supercomputer built in 2024 by HPE for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Unlike the latter, Lineshine uses CPU power only rather than APU or GPUs, a remarkable feat given the prevalence of these technologies. Only another supercomputer in the top 10, the Arm-powered Fugaku supercomputer, falls in that category.Details shared by Lu Yutong, the chief designer of Lineshine show that it is powered by more than 13.7 million ARMv9 cores spread over 90 racks and 45,360 CPUs. Yes, you’ve got it right, there are 304 cores per socket split in two chiplets, and eight NUMA domains each with 38 cores and 4GB HBM memory. There’s apparently eight CPU slots left empty per rack.Each socket can access 256GB of DDR5 memory, which means that the entire system has 128TB off-package RAM and 16TB HBM. The entire supercomputer has 11.6PB of traditional DDR5 memory and almost 1.5PB of HBM.Compared to El Capitan pure HBM3 approach, Lineshine opted for a tiered memory pool similar to traditional computers (using RAM and SSD). The system is connected to 200PB of direct storage as well.Breathtaking performanceAltogether, Lineshine reached 2.198 exaflops, 21% faster than the 1.809 exaflop figure reached by El Capitan. However numbers don’t tell the whole story; China’s new top dog consumes far more power than El Capitan, making it far less efficient. It only reached 52 Gigaflops/Watt compared to 60.95 Gigaflops for El Capitan and 73.28 for Kairos, the greenest supercomputer in operation.What is more interesting is the fact that each core, even running at 1.5GHz, reached about 200 Gigaflops of FP64. Significantly more than any supercomputing CPU Core (e.g. AMD Zen 4 or Nvidia Grace) which ironically underlines Chinese weakness when it comes to GPU, i.e they went the CPU way because they didn’t have any option than to go brute-force.And that’s despite the barrage of launches by Huawei over the past few years with the Ascend 910D, the Ascend 910C and the Ascend 920.Lineshine used its own version of Nvidia’s Nvlink interconnect called LinQi, one that can scale in excess of 100,000 nodes or more than 60 million cores, 4x the current core count. So there’s plenty of room to grow should Lineshine want to keep its rank.It is not the first time that China sits atop the TOP500 leaderboard. The last time it achieved it was with the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer back in 2017. And while nabbing the top spot on this leaderboard gets the winner bragging rights, it is only really useful for HPC (high performance computing) applications like CFD, earthquake simulation, materials, energy, drug design, neuroscience and scientific AI, and others.Hyperscalers like Google or Microsoft can muster even more powerful compute power, by at least an order of magnitude, if needed but that is not accounted for by TOP500 for various reasons.

Halo Campaign Evolved's executive producer, Damian Kahn, says the team wanted to explore the relationship between Sergeant Johnson and Master Chief for the three new missionsThe new missions were also inspired by Troy Denning's Halo novelsHalo Studios suggests players play them after the original storyHalo Campaign Evolved executive producer Damian Kahn and creative director Max Schlomberg have confirmed that the remake's three new missions were created with the help of Halo book author Troy Denning.In an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Summer Game Fest 2026, where we went hands-on with the upcoming game, the developers explained that the Halo universe has a lot to explore, but they wanted to explore the relationship between Sergeant Johnson and Master Chief in the missions of Operation: METEORITE."If you think about it, in the original game, you see Sergeant Johnson as such an important character in these original games, but you don't really get to know Sergeant Johnson that well, or his relationship with Chief," Kahn said. "That really set the stage for us creatively to think about, 'Hey, let's talk about a mission that they went on a year before the events of The Ring,' and then really to go into their relationship and how they fight alongside each other."Even beyond that, there's all this other universe. You've got Spartans and ODSTs. You've got the Brutes. You've got the Prophets. It's really just us leaning into these other elements of the story that we can tell more deeply, that then let you go back and appreciate more of the campaign and what's there."Schlomberg added that Troy Denning, one of the authors who writes some of the Halo novels, like Halo: Last Light, Halo: Retribution, and Halo: Silent Storm - A Master Chief Story, also "helped with the story" of the three missions."It's a lore-authentic story," he said, explaining that series veterans who have been fans for 25 years and played on Xbox or PC are going to get new bits of information that they've been wanting, allowing them to "piece more of the puzzle together," such as the Covenant War."It's really going to be fun for them," Schlomberg added. "But then also, if you're brand new to the experience, maybe you're a PlayStation player, you've never played before, and this is going to be something that would be really good to play after you play the main ring storyline."However, the creative director suggests that players play the new missions "after they've played and experienced the original.""It is meant to be played that way, because we've made it more of an intermediate difficulty experience, it's a little bit progressed further along. You start off, and it's a little bit more challenging than the first mission of Halo," he said."But again, you can play it in any order you would like. We're not going to make you choose or anything like that, but we just suggest that you play it that way."Halo Campaign Evolved arrives on July 28 for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC.