China's LineShine Hits 2.2 Exaflops With 13 Million CPU Cores

2.198 exaflops of sustained FP64 from a CPU-only system with 13 million cores just shoved LineShine to the top of the TOP500 list at ISC 2026 in Hamburg. That's 2.735 exaflops peak, pulled from 42.22 megawatts, for 52.07 gigaflops per watt. Not the most efficient machine on the Green500, but for a system that ditched GPUs entirely, it's a statement.

LineShine's LX2: A 304-Core Armv9 Beast

The LX2 chip is the backbone. Each CPU packs 304 Armv9 cores running at 1.55 GHz, with SVE2 and SME support. Two compute dies, each with four 40-core clusters, but two cores per cluster disabled, leaving 38 active per cluster. That's 152 active cores per die. L2 cache totals 228 MB across both dies (114 MB per die, split as 28.5 MB per cluster).

From Node to Cabinet: 22,000 Nodes and 42 Megawatts

Each node holds two LX2 CPUs and 800 Gbps of networking per CPU (1.6 Tbps per node). Eight nodes form a blade, sixteen blades make a frame, two frames a cabinet. Ninety cabinets give you 22,000+ nodes and over 13 million cores. Memory is tiered: 32 GB of on-package high-bandwidth memory (likely a domestic alternative to HBM, per the source) with 4 TB/s bandwidth, plus 256 GB of DDR5 per node for spillover. The whole thing draws 42.22 megawatts for the 2.198 exaflops run.

HPCG Crown and What It Means

LineShine isn't a LINPACK special. It scored 22.004 petaflops on HPCG, beating El Capitan's 17.406 petaflops. That signals real-world solver performance, not just a tuned benchmark. Meanwhile, Eni's HPC7 (30% of El Capitan, using MI300A APUs) slid into number 6, making Italy the European compute leader on paper. Fugaku dropped to number 9 but remains number 3 on HPCG, showing that HPC-focused design ages slowly.

Green500's top ten stayed frozen for the first time in history. Not because efficiency stagnated, but because the fleet got greener as old iron retired. The bigger question coming out of ISC: will LineShine's submission push the DOE to open its wallet, or will AI labs finally bench their Blackwell clusters and submit real HPL numbers? For now, the LX2 proves that a monolithic CPU army can still take the crown.

Source: TOP500 at ISC'26: We have a New Number 1
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