Now everything is on fire sale

The Chinese have stomped US and Japanese supercomputing hegemony into oblivion. The Tianhe-1A has 1.4x the computing power of the next fastest US system, operating  at 2.5 petaflops (that's 1000 trillion cycles per second). Intel and NVidia fell over each other selling the most powerful chips in the world to the Chinese to build this machine.

This supercomputer will help the Chinese build better technologies to sell to the West and more advanced weapons to threaten rivals. At one time the US would have withheld such sales to maintain US technology preeminence. Now everything is on fire sale.