Every year the industry ranks the world's top super computers. The rankings changed again this year as a neophyte from the National University of Defense Technology grabbed the top spot. The Top500 Supercomputer Sites list updates their ranking twice a year. For this period, Intel-based Milky Way 2 takes the number one spot.

Milky Way 2 or Tianhe-2 recorded a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s based on the Linpack benchmark. This recorded performance is twice better than the performance of the top ranking supercomputer back in November 2012. The Milky Way features 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. It also runs on 32,000 Xeon processors for an overall average of 3,120,000 computing cores.

Chip giant Intel also added another record to their list of achievements because the Milky Way is an exclusive to the brand. It is the first Intel-based system to reach the top rank dating from 1997. Intel Corp. has been making waves for the last couple of weeks because of their Haswell processors and line of ultrabooks.

The Milky Way 2 beats previously number spot Titan Cray XK7. Titan's record is at 17.59 petaflop/s based from the Linpack benchmark. The supercomputer runs on 261,632 of its NVIDIA K20x accelerator cores.

The win for Intel was a surprise. Tianhe-2's win as the world's fastest computer meant China's first return to the number one spot since 2010. The supercomputer will be released in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho towards the latter part of the year.

Reports indicate that people were not expecting the machine to win especially since completion of the model was not supposed to be for a couple of years. Unveiling Milky Way 2 further boosts Intel's position in the tech industry. U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory currently uses Titan.