In the June 2024 TOP500 ranking, AMD-powered Frontier held the No. 1 position with an HPL result of 1.206 exaflops, ahead of Intel-powered Aurora at No. 2 with 1.012 exaflops. That result describes performance on one benchmark at one point in time—not an overall win on every scientific or AI workload.
What did “staves off Intel” mean?
It meant Frontier remained ahead of Aurora on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used for the June 2024 TOP500 list. Frontier recorded 1.206 exaflops and Aurora recorded 1.012 exaflops, according to TOP500’s June 2024 ranking. The U.S. Department of Energy described the pair as the world’s first and second official exascale systems, respectively: DOE holds the #1 and #2 positions.
An exaflop is a quintillion floating-point operations per second. In this context, the figures are HPL benchmark results, not a guarantee that a system performs at that rate on every application.
How Frontier and Aurora compare
| Category | Frontier | Aurora |
|---|---|---|
| June 2024 TOP500 position | No. 1 | No. 2 |
| HPL result (TOP500, 2024) | 1.206 exaflops | 1.012 exaflops |
| CPU and accelerator | 3rd-generation AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators | Intel Xeon CPU Max processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max accelerators |
| Platform | HPE Cray EX235a architecture | HPE Cray EX architecture with Intel Exascale Compute Blades |
| Interconnect | Slingshot-11 | Slingshot-11 |
| Reported core count | 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores (TOP500, 2024) | not stated in the cited June 2024 comparison |
| June 2024 configuration context | not described as a half-scale submission in the cited TOP500 material | TOP500 described the submitted configuration as half-scale |
Frontier is installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Aurora is installed at Argonne National Laboratory. The system specifications and Frontier core count are listed in the June 2024 TOP500 entries. TOP500 also characterized Aurora as the second exascale machine, noting that its submitted configuration was half-scale: Frontier keeps top spot, but Aurora officially becomes the second exascale machine.
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What Aurora’s half-scale result does—and doesn’t—say
Aurora had crossed the exascale threshold on HPL in the June submission despite being described as a half-scale system in that submission context. The description is important: it is not a claim that the listed 1.012-exaflop result was a full-scale system result, nor does it establish what a full-scale configuration would score. The ranking compares the submitted systems and results, not hypothetical future configurations.
Was Frontier still No. 1 after June 2024?
No. TOP500’s November 2024 list placed El Capitan first, Frontier second, and Aurora third. Frontier’s lead over Aurora therefore applies to the June 2024 ranking, not to every subsequent list. See TOP500’s November 2024 ranking.
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Does the HPL ranking prove Frontier is better for every task?
No. HPL provides the score used for this TOP500 comparison, but one benchmark cannot establish which machine is faster for every scientific simulation, data-analysis job, or AI workload. Those outcomes depend on the application, software, precision, memory needs, and how well the program uses each system’s CPUs, accelerators, and interconnect. The June ranking supports a narrow conclusion: Frontier posted the higher HPL result among these two systems in that list.
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