The IBM Roadrunner has long held the top spot as the worlds fastest computer, however this week it was topped by the Cray XT5 also known as the Jaguar, an AMD Opteron core system that posted speeds up to 1.75 petaflop/s using the Linpack test. The Roadrunner meanwhile reached only 1 petaflop/s.
It was the first win for the Jaguar which had twice come in second place to the Roadrunner before a recent upgrade helped reach its current speeds. The XT5 while offering impressive speeds is actually able (in theory) to reach speeds up to 2.3 petaflop/s using 250,000 cores.
During speed testing all of the top placing systems had one thing in common, they relied on quad-core processors, with 80 percent of those processors coming from Intel, although it was the AMD Opteron chipset that led the way on the Jaguar. [Electronista]
