China's National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen announced the Lingshen supercomputer project at a conference on April 24, targeting sustained performance above 2 ExaFLOPS using only CPUs and no foreign-made components. The system would pack 47,000 processors into 92 compute cabinets, making it the first exascale machine designed to reach that performance tier without GPU accelerators. Lu Yutong, director of the Shenzhen supercomputing center and the system's chief designer, presented the technical details at the event. Every other exascale system in operation relies heavily on GPUs or accelerator hardware. The U.S. Department of Energy's El Capitan, currently the world's fastest supercomputer , runs on 44,544 AMD MI300A APUs that tightly couple CPU and GPU silicon on a single package. Lingsheng’s CPU-only architecture would represent a fundamentally different approach to reaching exascale throughput.…