China has developed a new supercomputer said to pack a peak theoretical performance of 1.07 petaflops. Called the Sunway BlueLight MPP, its number crunching abilities will likely place it among the 20 fastest supercomputers in its debut at the annual world ranking of the top 500 supercomputers next month. While this doesn't appear to be much compared to the 2,507 petaflops clocked by the Tianhe-1A last November, the talking point here is how the Sunway eschewed microprocessors and GPUs from companies such as Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), AMD and Nvidia in favor of a made-in-China microprocessor.

The heart of the Sunway is powered by 8,704 processors of a previously undisclosed chip called the Shenwei 1600. Designed at a Chinese computer institute and manufactured in Shanghai, not much is known about the SW1600 except that it is a 64-bit microprocessor with 16 cores. According to a report on The Register, the SW1600 runs at a clock speed of between 975MHz and 1.1GHz to deliver up to 140.8 gigaflops each.

More interestingly, the SW1600 reportedly uses a new instruction set and not the legacy x86 used by chip-makers Intel and AMD.  Alluding to the shift towards designed- and built-in-China processors, Jack Dongarra, who oversees the annual list of the top 500 supercomputers, told Wired: "It shows that there's a significant effort underway in China to build multicore processors that can be put into the world's fastest computers."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Wired
- check out this article at The Register

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