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Do the fastest supercomputers always use graphics processing units (GPUs)?

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

No, some central processing unit-only supercomputers remain competitive. The Fugaku supercomputer, running on Fujitsu A64FX central processing units (CPUs), remained the fastest supercomputer in the world on the June 2020 and June 2021 TOP500 lists. In 2026 China’s LineShine supercomputer, running on an all-CPU architecture, superseded the United States’ GPU-based El Capitan to become the world’s fastest system, making it China’s first top-ranked supercomputer since 2017 and demonstrating that CPU-based architectures could still compete with GPU-accelerated systems at the highest levels of performance.