The Glorious People's Republic of China is stepping up its semiconductor manufacturing efforts and using domestic chips for its latest supercomputer.

It seems that China is confident that it can close the technological gap between itself and the likes of Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Currently, the Chinese are about three generations behind the state-of-art chip making technologies used by the United States, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

According to the New York Times a supercomputer called Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Centre in Jinan, China. The details emerged at a technical meeting. While China has supercomputers, the killer is that this one used 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 chips which were homegrown behind the Great Wall of China. The New York Times quotes Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, who helps manage the list of Top 500 supercomputers as saying the news was a “bit of a surprise” China's previous supercomputers used Intel and Nvidia chips.

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