The AI Hardware Summit: A Recap

Taiwan-based TSMC, the world's largest chip foundry, recently announced (https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332869) that high performance computing (HPC) has supplanted smart phones as the most important driver of its business, although presumably not yet the largest financially.

At SC17 in Denver, the Japanese RIKEN K computer emerged for the third straight time as the world's most powerful supercomputer based on the High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark list. Although China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer has been widely seen as number one in the world based on its LINPAC rating, the HPCG test that the K computer excelled on may be more representative of the range of real-world HPC problems encounter by users. Riken's K computer has been either number one or two since the HPCG list came out in 2014.