By Hamza in Quantum Weekly — Sep 28, 2026

The SC #131

Issue #131 of The SC. Weekly supercomputing news. AMD gives us details on Venice CPUs and SiPearl ships its ARM supercomputing ARM chips. Google does some real magic with hypervisors.

AMD gave us more details about its latest CPUs (codenamed Venice) including a comprehensive list of SKUs. There’s updated version of the 9755 we tested last year, the 9756 a 128 core 4GHz part which I’d like to get my hands on to see how performance has evolved over the last three generations, Genoa to Turin and now Venice.

More interestingly though there’s a 256 core part with the same boosted clock speed and same L3 cache per core all for only an extra 100W of TDP. That sounds pretty interesting for high density compute( for end of day risk runs for example). There’s also a couple of new 5GHz SKUs which could be potentially work well for more real time HPC applications (such as intraday financial risk).

Staying on the CPU theme for a minute, SiPearl has started shipping its ARM based CPUs that are powering Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale class supercomputer. Rhea1 will form a new CPU workload specific section of Jupiter and the chips have an interesting design that incorporates 64GB of HBM in addition to the usual DDR memory lanes. For the AI kids out there, this is the stuff you need for real work 😁. Or more concretely, workloads that require large amounts of fast memory. Remember that memory wall we talked about? Yea solid attack on that right there. It’s not the first system to attempt this either, Fugaku (Japan Top500 candidate) did this some years ago. It remains a relatively underexplored architecture though and I suspect that’s being not helping by Top500 race as it won’t secure you the number 1 spot (but probably is rather good for real work).

Sticking with alternatives to the US semiconductor hegemony, Huawei and Ali Baba have been busy coming up with alternatives not only to Nvidia GPUs but also the interconnects needed for putting the super into supercomputing and the storage to go with it. It’s not like I’m hearing any big western companies talking about installing the latest Huawei system, but still, I wonder if that changes at all.

Next up, changing tack completely, Googe seems to be doing some kind of magic. I’m sure I’ve probably completely misunderstood this, because surely this isn’t possible… but they have proposed changes to the Linux kernel that will allow a hypvervisor’s guest VM to continue running even while the host is patched and even rebooted. WTAF?

In updates from us at HMx towers, I stopped dallying around long enough last week to actually put the booking form for HPC Club live, so if you want to come along and hear about how to create software defined supercomputers in the cloud (or just control cloud resources agnostically across multiple providers) then I wouldn’t hang about. Places are filling up pretty quickly. We’ll have a limited number of our new T shirts to give away too.

Lastly, if you’ve ever wondered how I trawl the digital world for supercomputing and HPC news every week, wonder no more because it doesn’t matter. Fernanda has come up with a much better way, it makes my life easier and you can get a complete feed of everything HPC without my filter over at The Daily Flop.

Have a good week all.