The US banned China from getting its paws on Xeons because it wanted to slow down the country's nuclear testing programme. Supercomputers are a key element in testing simulations. 

However if the US thought that the Chinese would give up on making super computers it was sadly mistaken.

The Sunway TaihuLight China has 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. It has a theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops and it is the first system to exceed 100 petaflops.

TaihuLight is installed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise.

It is used for advanced manufacturing, earth systems modelling, life science and big data applications.

The fastest US supercomputer, number 3 on the Top500 list, is the Titan, a Cray supercomputer at US Dept. of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory with a theoretical peak of about 27 petaflops.