原子弹恐惧症 美国叫停英特尔对华出售芯片

The US government has refused to let Intel help China update the world's biggest supercomputer.

美国政府拒绝让英特尔公司帮助中国升级世界最大的超级计算机。

Intel applied for a licence to export tens of thousands of chips to update the Tianhe-2 computer.

英特尔公司向美国政府申请了出口许可证，以出口数万芯片帮助天河2号计算机的升级。

The Department of Commerce refused, saying it was concerned about nuclear research being done with the machine.

但是美国商务部拒绝了这一申请。理由是担心这一计算机与中国从事核研究有关。

Separately, Intel has signed a $200m (£136m) deal with the US government to build amassive supercomputer at one of its national laboratories.

另外，英特尔公司已经与美国政府签了高达2亿美元(约1.36亿英镑)的合约，在美国一国家实验室中建立大规模的超级计算机。

The Tianhe-2 uses 80,000 Intel Xeon chips to generate a computational capacity of more than 33 petaflops. A petaflop is equal to about one quadrillion calculations per second.

天河2号使用了8万个英特尔至强芯片，每秒能够计算超过33x1015次。

According to the Top 500, an organisation that monitors supercomputers, the Tianhe-2 has been the world's most powerful machine for the past 18 months.

Top 500是一家搜集超级计算机情报的机构。据该机构消息，过去的一年半里，天河2号是世界上最强大的计算机。

This year the Chinese machine was due to undergo a series of upgrades to boost its number-crunching abilities past 110 petaflops. The upgrades would depend largely on new Intel Xeon chips. The chipmaker informed US authorities of its involvement with the upgrade programme and was told to apply for an export licence.

今年，天河2号将要进行一系列的升级，希望将这台机器超强的数字处理功能提升至每秒110x1015次以上。这一升级很大程度上要依赖英特尔公司提供的Xeon芯片。因此英特尔公司向美国政府汇报了此事，并向政府申请出口许可。