Winner: Slingshot-11
Slingshot-11 is a 200G proprietary interconnect developed by HPE and its Cray supercomputer subsidiary. As the number of Cray systems increases on the list, so goes the number of Slingshot-11 based systems. The total number of Slingshot-11 systems jumped from 37 and 2024 to 52 this year.
Loser: Ethernet
I want to preface this by adding the caveat that a third of all networking is lumped into the amorphous “other” category, making a complete picture of difficult to obtain. That said, Ethernet is falling out of favor has an interconnect for HPC.
First, despite all the hype and hubbub and enthusiasm around 400G and 800G Ethernet, 25G and 100G are the only two break-out Ethernet ports on the list. On the November 2025 list, 25G and 100G Ethernet accounted for 78 systems. One year earlier, 10G, 25G and 100G accounted for 132 systems total.
Winner: Intel
Among the CPU processor generations, the new Xeon 6, AKA Sapphire Rapids, which debuted earlier this year and thus didn’t make a showing on the 2024 list, now powers 73 systems, surpassing the AMD Zen 3 (Milan) architecture for the most widely deployed CPU architecture.
Loser: AMD
Despite having two of the top three supercomputers using its GPU accelerator and the fact that Instinct is on par with the best from Nvidia, AMD is really getting no traction with its Instinct line. It went from 12 systems in 2024 to 14 systems in 2025, and that was with the older MI250X cards, which have since been replaced by the 300 generation.
Things weren’t much better on the processor side. The Zen 2 through Zen 4 architectures collectively accounted for 162 systems in 2024 and 164 systems in 2025 for a gain of two.
