Intel Hit By Supercomputer Chip Ban
The US government has refused to let Intel help China update the world's biggest supercomputer. Intel applied for a licence to export tens of thousands of chips to update the Tianhe-2 computer. The Department of Commerce refused, saying it was concerned about nuclear research being done with the machine. Separately, Intel has signed a $200m (£136m) deal with the US government to build a massive supercomputer at one of its national laboratories. The Tianhe-2 uses 80,000 Intel Xeon chips to generate a computational capacity of more than 33 petaflops. A petaflop is equal to about one quadrillion calculations per second. According to the Top 500, an organisation that monitors supercomputers, the Tianhe-2 has been the world's most powerful machine for the past 18 months. This year the Chinese machine was due to undergo a series of upgrades to boost its number-crunching abilities past 110 petaflops. The upgrades would depend largely on new Intel Xeon chips. The chipmak