So, if you were building the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, how would you scale it from 125 petaflops peak double precision performance up to at least 1 exaflops? There are a bunch of ways to do it, but according to this paper, NRCPC took some obvious approaches enabled in part by the chip process manufacturing shrink that was no doubt used from Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, the big indigenous foundry in China that is trying to get on par with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, Samsung Electronics, and Intel with its chip foundries.
SMIC’s 14 nanometer FinFET processes were in volume production in 2019, so the SW26010 is using a much older process, and
is said to be equivalent to Samsung’s 8 nanometer process and better than TSMC’s 10 nanometer. This N+1 process is a little young to be used in a chip that might go into production this year. So assuming that the SW26010 was made with 28 nanometer processes, we think that the future
Sunway exascale processor – let’s call it the SW52020 for reasons that will be obvious in a minute – will have the ability to shrink the processor die size quite a bit, keep clocks the same or lower, and significantly boost the compute elements on the chip. And by
sticking with 14 nanometer, NRCPC has the
8 nanometer shrink — or smaller — to try to push to
10 exaflops with a future machine.
