China has built a super computer that can perform 1,000 trillion calculations (a petaflop) per second using it’s own microprocessor chips. This advance has surprised industry specialists in the US and abroad.

This new super computer will now rank as one of the top 20 fastest computers in the world.

The computer is composed of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, and it was designed at a Chinese computer institute and manufactured in Shanghai.

The NY Times claims that China is about “three generations behind the state-of-art chip making technologies used by world leaders such as the United States, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.” This new invention shows China’s determination to advance.