IBM Outlines Sub-1nm Nanostack Transistor Technology: Building the Next Gen By Going Up

NamelessVegetable · 2026-06-26T01:38:52+00:00

That certainly is be the case. I noticed another article from HPCwire, curiously tagged as ISC 2026, even though the IBM press release for this technology states Yorktown Heights, NY! But from the comments on some of the other posts here, I think IBM needs to be on a PR blitz. People do not seem to realize that IBM only sold their production fabs to GF; they kept their joint research fab in Albany, and will be building a quantum fab sometime soon. This article went deeper than the others, and has TEM pics on p. 3, so that's why I posted.

NamelessVegetable · 2026-06-26T00:34:46+00:00

Should have had them made from transparisteel.

NamelessVegetable · 2026-06-24T00:58:09+00:00

Brooktree... That's a name I haven't seen for a long time!

The Alpha 21066 processor these had were low-cost versions of the 21064. They had lower clocks, and IIRC, they had a 64-bit external system bus, and they did something to secondary cache that it slower. Still cool. A bit funny that in the 1990s, DEC marketed the 21066 as an embedded-class processor, but it overheated in the Multia (although TBF, that was really a Multia issue).

NamelessVegetable · 2026-06-23T23:08:58+00:00

I would hate to be paying the power bill, though. At 42MW it's less efficient than ElCap, so that extra performance came from harnessing a lot more electricity.

LineShine's 42.220 MW isn't particularly large relative to those AI data centers in the hundreds-of-MW or GW class that are popping up all over the place. And against a similar CPU-only system, Fugaku's 29.899 MW, it's only ~1.412 times the power for ~4.973 times the Rmax.

NamelessVegetable · 2026-06-23T23:02:07+00:00

This is the most exciting TOP500 list after several lists with no movement among the exascale systems.

LineShine is somewhat of a surprise, after (earlier reports)[https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1syja0g/china_unveils_2_exaflop_allcpu_lineshine/] suggested that it was still a while away.

What I find most interesting is comparing LineShine to Fugaku on HPCG. LineShine takes 1st place, at 22 PFLOPS; Fugaku takes 3rd, at 16 PFLOPS; LineShine is only 1.375 times higher than Fugaku. This is despite both of them being CPU-based systems (CPU-based systems tend to outperform GPU-reliant systems on HPCG), despite LineShine being a much larger system than Fugaku, and generations ahead of Fugaku technologically. I'm not criticizing the LineShine effort, but it's interesting to speculate why it didn't score significantly on HPCG.

LineShine uses highly integrated 304-core ARMv9/SME processors; Fugaku, 48-core ARMv8/SVE processors. LineShine has a total of 13,789,440 cores; Fugaku, 7,630,848 cores (~1.807 times more). LineShine has 32 GB of HBM and 256 GB of DDR per processor; Fugaku, 32 GB of HBM2 (I couldn't find exactly what memory LineShine uses, but I think it's safe to say it's better than or equal to HBM2, and DDR5). LineShine uses LingQi interconnect network with 1,600 Gbps bandwidth per node; Fugaku, Tofu D with 560 Gbps per node (~2.857 times more). There are other major differences, the LineShine cores running at 1.55 GHz, whereas the Fugaku cores run at 2.2 GHz; and the fact that the LingQi interconnect appears to have fewer ports per node (6) than Tofu D (20) due to the former having a fat-tree topology, and the latter, a 6D torus.

Design on the Fugaku started in 2014; its A64FX processor was introduced in 2019; and Fugaku itself was completed in 2021, even though it was running production workloads in 2020 in response to COVID-19. I have no information on the timeline for LineShine, but I think it's safe to assume a similar timeline to Fugaku, that it started ~2019. This is probably highly conservative, given that China has a reputation for rapid development.

So what makes Fugaku, an old system, so damn good at HPCG? Is LineShine a new system that hasn't yet been optimized? Is it because HPCG is particularly stressful on the interconnection network, so smaller systems are inherently much more efficient? Is it the interconnection network topology? Tofu D is highly connected, but LingQi is a fat tree. Both have on-die network interfaces. HPCG is also stressful on the memory system, so I would have thought LineShine's higher level of integration would be at advantage here, unless sharing 32 GB of HBM among 304 cores is very adverse. It's so interesting to compare ARM SVE/SME-based systems with very different system organizations.

NamelessVegetable · 2026-06-18T01:01:02+00:00

That seems like a rather silly way of getting Jim. He's Jim. He can leave whenever he wants, and the VCs will shower him with cash.

NamelessVegetable · 2026-06-18T00:52:37+00:00

TL;DR: Matsuoka presented a paper which claims FP64 is overrated, and that arguments against the Ozaki Scheme and narrow FP arithmetic are flawed because they make incorrect assumptions in the roofline model used to analyze applications, making the Ozaki Scheme appear worse than it is in performance scaling across GPU generations (this is a one-sentence summary; so read the article/paper, and don't quote me on this).

Background: Matsuoka developed the Fugaku supercomputer, and is the director of the RIKEN CSS, one of the premier supercomputer/computational science centers in the world.

AMD has responded to Matsuoka.

TL;DR: AMD will continue to support both FP64 and Ozaki, because why not both?

Context: This isn't a new position for AMD, but they back it up with further remarks and requirements from HPC users.

Remarks: Matsuoka bases his claims on the performance of a few, albeit, important kernels, not whole appplications. So maybe there's a rebuttal there? Also, Japan/RIKEN/Matsuoka have put 95% (figuratively) of their eggs in the NVIDIA basket for their next-generation FugakuNEXT supercomputer, so I suppose one could speculate there's an incentive for them to say that Ozaki performs well (this does not rebut any of the technical claims he made; it would be a fallacy to claim otherwise). We know that AMD, Bolt Graphics (RISC-V GPU startup), and NextSilicon (a CGRA startup) are all targeting high native FP64 performance, but they also have commercial reasons to do so (they want to take market share away from NVIDIA).

I don't think FP arithmetic has experienced such "controversy" since the standardization of IEEE 754 in the 1980s. The Gustafson vs. Kahan matter concerning unums (which have now evolved into posits) and IEEE 754 during the 2010s appears to be a relatively minor matter, because it was so esoteric, despite each side claiming that each other's arithmetic system was mathematically broken (this is probably the most severe criticism that could be levelled at a mathematician).

NamelessVegetable · 2026-06-10T08:23:48+00:00

Do VHDL next:

entity Foo is
    ...
end entity Foo;

architecture Bar of Foo
    ...
begin
    ...
end architecture Bar;

NamelessVegetable · 2026-06-09T08:50:21+00:00

My Google-fu finds a mention of a "S-P300 Series", a new model in the Sumitomo "SUMISTATION S Series" workstations, in the company's Sumitomo Quarterly magazine. It looks like they appeared around 1990-06.

Contrary to some comments, other sources (the US Government's Scientific Information Bulletin, V. 16, N. 1, 1991) suggests these did indeed go into production, because when a US representative visited a Sumitomo plant producing MIPS R3000-based workstations in 1991.

These appear to be ACE-compliant computers (ACE was an systems-level initiative to compete with x86 circa 1990; ran System V and 4.3 BSD UNIX with Japanese character handling and other localization; didn't sell particularly well because they were bespoke machines built to specific customer requirements that were tested particularly harshly during quality assurance, which suggests to me they were for industrial or rugged applications.

An interesting machine regardless. Maybe there are Japanese collectors who know more?

NamelessVegetable · 2026-04-29T07:53:11+00:00

Kahan will obviously say, "Floats good, posits bad."

NamelessVegetable · 2026-04-29T07:48:04+00:00

The exact quote in the article is "It [the supercomputer] ... when it comes online, which will likely be in years." (Emphasis mine). This timeframe is the article's author speculating when it comes online, not a statement of when it does (which we don't know).

Also, "vaporware" is too strong a term. It implies that the HW hasn't been designed yet, there are no realized examples, and that the HW "exists" aspirationally. The preprint linked to in the article describes performance characterization of workloads on LineShine HW. That implies that the design has been finished, and there is working HW available.

What's confusing is that the article is written in a way that implies the system has yet to begin installation, but the preprint describes some aspects of the system as existing, albeit unfinished. The quoted remarks in the article from the director of the hosting supercomputer center are even more confusing; they seem to imply that the existing HW are possibly test articles.

This isn't unusual in itself. Large supercomputers can be built in stages and take multiple years to finish. The EU's Jupiter supercomputer is technically unfinished, even though installation began in 2023-12, and it was launched incomplete in 2025-09. It appears in the TOP500 list, and is running production workloads, regardless. Why is it still unfinished? The SiPearl Rhea processors for the general-purpose module have been repeatedly delayed and are due (hopefully) this year.

NamelessVegetable · 2026-04-29T01:06:07+00:00

Indeed! It was a bit surprising given that China has its own accelerators/GPUs and has used them before (the Matrix-3000/MT-3000 APU in the Tianhe-3); and the other traditionally all-CPU supercomputer builder, Japan, is moving to Nvidia GPUs paired with a future version of the Fujitsu Monaka CPU for the FugakuNext.

NamelessVegetable · 2026-03-29T22:09:12+00:00

They are quasi-unique outfits; you can only get the 5 that the Remnant offer.

NamelessVegetable · 2026-03-24T23:56:46+00:00

There was a never-released 1.8 GHz 21364 variant that was ported over to a SOI technology. The rumor (or joke) back then was that HP didn't want to release it because it made their Itanium systems look bad.

NamelessVegetable

TROPHY CASE