AMD Powered El Capitan and Frontier Maintain Global Supercomputing Leadership

Top500 No. 1 and No. 2 Systems Reinforce AMD Leadership in Delivering Exceptional HPC and AI Performance 

News Highlights

• At ISC High Performance 2025, AMD again demonstrated its HPC leadership with the El Capitan and Frontier systems retaining the No. 1 and No. 2 positions on the latest Top500 list.
• AMD powered system ranked as the world’s most powerful supercomputer for the seventh consecutive Top500 list
• 172 systems (34%) on the latest Top500 list now use AMD
• AMD powers 12 of the top 20 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world

El Capitan: The World’s Fastest Supercomputer

El Capitan, deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, maintained its position as the world’s fastest supercomputer, posting a 1.742 exaflops High Performance Linpack (HPL) score. Built by HPE, this exascale system continues to deliver increased performance using AMD Instinct™ MI300A APUs, combining CPU and GPU compute in a single package to power massive AI and scientific workloads.

The integrated architecture is engineered for mixed workloads—simulations, analytics, and AI inference—all in one unified platform.

“From El Capitan to Frontier, AMD continues to power the world’s most advanced supercomputers, delivering record-breaking performance and leadership energy efficiency,” said Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions Group, AMD. “With the latest Top500 list, AMD not only holds the top two spots but now powers 172 of the world’s fastest systems—more than ever before—underscoring our accelerating momentum and the trust HPC leaders place in our CPUs and GPUs to drive scientific discovery and AI innovation.”

“El Capitan is a transformative national resource that will dramatically expand the computational capabilities of the NNSA labs at Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia in support of our national security and science missions,” said Rob Neely, Associate Director for Weapon Simulation and Computing at LLNL. “With AMD’s advanced APU architecture, we can now perform simulations with the precision and confidence we set as a goal 15 years ago, when the path to exascale was difficult to foresee. As a bonus, this platform is a true ‘two-fer’ - an HPC and AI powerhouse that will fundamentally reshape how we fulfill our mission.”

Frontier: Holding Strong at No. 2

Frontier, the world’s very first exascale system, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, maintained its No. 2 spot with an HPL score of 1.353 exaflops. Built by HPE and powered by AMD EPYC™ CPUs and AMD Instinct™ MI250X GPUs, supporting scientific discovery and advanced computational research ranging from energy and climate modeling to next-generation AI.

HPL-MxP and Green500: Performance Meets Efficiency

In the HPL-MxP benchmark category, which evaluates systems on mixed-precision AI workloads, El Capitan has debuted as the No. 1 ranked system achieving 16.7 exaflops. Frontier and LUMI—another leading system powered by AMD—followed in third and fourth, respectively, reinforcing AMD leadership in the convergence of AI and HPC.

El Capitan also debuted with the highest High-Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark score of 17.4 petaflops. The HPCG category provides an alternative metric for assessing the performance of scientific applications.  The No. 1 spot highlights that the Instinct MI300A APUs in El Capitan provide the world’s leading memory bandwidth.

Showcasing the energy efficiency of AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators, AMD is powering 12 of top 20 systems on the latest Green500 list, The Green500 list also highlighted the energy efficiency of El Capitan and Frontier, achieving impressive efficiency scores, ranking #26 and #32, respectively. Considering their massive compute power with the top HPL performance, the rankings reflect the performance-per-watt leadership of AMD Instinct accelerators and EPYC processors—vital as HPC and AI workloads become increasingly power-intensive.

 Global Momentum: AMD Powers 172 Top500 Systems

AMD continues to grow its global HPC footprint. 

• 172 systems on the latest Top500 list now use AMD, more than a third of the world’s most powerful systems, including:
• 17 systems debuting on the list, including 5 systems powered by 5^th Gen AMD EPYC processors.
• Hunter system at the High-Performance Computing Center (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS), powered by AMD Instinct MI300A APUs.
• University of Hull’s Viper supercomputer, powered by AMD Instinct MI300A APUs.
• Pitagora, new EUROfusion supercomputer hosted by CINECA in Italy, powered by 5^th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs.

These results and highlights from the latest Top500 are more than just headline achievements—they are proof points in the ongoing mission of AMD to deliver exceptional performance and energy efficiency, at scale.

Driving the Future of HPC and AI

As AI and HPC continue to converge, the role of scalable, efficient compute becomes more critical than ever. AMD is proud to help lead that transformation— reshaping how research institutions and enterprises solve complex problems—from nuclear safety and climate modeling to LLM training and generative AI inference. With a scalable portfolio of CPUs, GPUs, and APUs optimized for performance and efficiency, AMD is powering everything from exascale systems to edge AI innovations.