China’s LineShine supercomputer takes the No. 1 spot on the latest TOP500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers, released at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg. The Shenzhen-based system replaces the US supercomputer El Capitan, which had held the top position in the previous TOP500 edition. Multiple outlets report that LineShine debuts on the list and posts a sustained performance of about 2.198 exaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, surpassing El Capitan’s reported 1.809 exaflops. Coverage also emphasizes that LineShine is built around CPUs rather than GPUs, using Chinese-developed processors based on Armv9-based LX2 cores. Reports describe millions of CPU cores and custom interconnect and software components, presenting the system as part of China’s push for domestic computing capabilities. Several articles note that the TOP500 list focuses on HPL performance and that “world’s fastest” on this metric does not necessarily translate directly to all AI or other workloads, with some discussion of alternative benchmarks included in the broader ranking ecosystem.