It is also home to more than half of the world's top 500 supercomputers, compared with China's 66.And, making the mythological analogy even more apposite, much of Tianhe-2's gubbins, including many of its processors, come from Titan's homeland.
Its processor comes not from Intel or even its rival, Advanced Micro Devices, but from Taiwan's VIA, the company that in 1999 bought out the PC chip divisions of both National Semiconductor and IDT in the course of a few months.
Plus, the iPad is apparently speedy, too, although its processor is far from the mystery silicon we all thought.
And it's building its connectivity also into processors from Qualcomm as part of that larger opportunity.
The company also announced Thursday that it would use processors from Advanced Micro Devices in some of its desktop PC's.
The current MacBook Air is much more powerful than its predecessors and new processors from AMD and Intel will supplant the runty Atom with something like the Athlon Neo, a more balanced chip with a bit more speed.
The new 512MB version sits nicely between the two, and has had its shader processors upped from 96 to 128, which are especially important in this year's crop of games.
The settlement of the suit brought by the F.T.C. in December forbids Intel from rewarding computer makers that use only Intel computer processing chips and punishing those that buy processors from Advanced Micro Devices, its main rival.
This is a huge blow to ZTE, which sources a significant portion of its most important components, including processors, from U.S. companies like Qualcomm.
Sun can use cheaper processors from Intel in its servers instead, configuring them so they can still run existing Sun programs.
