HPC Won't Be An X86 Monoculture Forever - And It's Starting To Show
The Register, Thursday, November 27th, 2025
Arm and RISC-V would like a word
Remember when high-performance computing always seemed to be about x86? Exactly a decade ago, almost nine in ten supercomputers in the TOP500 (a list of the beefiest machines maintained twice yearly by academics) were Intel-based. Today, it's down to 57 percent.
Intel might once have ruled the HPC roost but its influence is waning. Today, other processors are making significant inroads.
Supercomputing development has evolved in waves since Cray pioneered vector processors (which were excellent at conducting single operations across large data sets) in the mid-1970s.