China just broke the supercomputing sound barrier. LineShine, developed by the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, debuted at No. 1 on the TOP500 list with a sustained performance of 2.198 exaflops on the High Performance Linpack benchmark. That makes it the first system in history to crack the 2-exaflop threshold using only CPUs.
The announcement came at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, on June 23, 2026. It dethrones the American-built El Capitan, which had held the crown since late 2024 with its 1.809 exaflops. For context, LineShine is roughly 21% faster than the machine it replaced.
What makes LineShine different
Most top-tier supercomputers lean heavily on GPUs to hit their performance numbers. LineShine took a different path entirely, built on an all-CPU architecture using Armv9 LX2 processors. The system packs 13.79 million cores across 304-core chips running at 1.55 GHz.
The machine doesn’t just top the main ranking. It also claimed the No. 1 spot on the High-Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) list with 22.00 petaflops. On the HPL-MxP list, which measures mixed-precision workloads, it landed fourth with 7.92 exaflops.
