The last time when China had the fastest supercomputer, it was more than 20 times slower than this one and more than 8 times less efficient in energy consumption.
Moreover, its capability was overestimated by the Linpack benchmarks and in other workloads its performance was much less impressive.
For this system, it is the opposite situation. Its result in Top500 underestimates it capability. In other more demanding workloads, where the influence of the memory bandwidth and latency is stronger, its advantage over the US supercomputers is greater than in Top500.
It's the same. Nobody was buying POWER9 or A64FX systems, and manufacturers of those are no factor to anything.
One could theoretically drive home with a ready-to-go rack of non-American and/or non-x86 supercomputer nodes at any point in time across the last few decades, sometimes even with non-NVIDIA/AMD massively parallel coprocessor cards. Nobody did.
If China(or any country) would _ship_ these alternative supercomputer hardware, only then anything could change.
