Aurora, a supercomputer that Intel is building with the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory for artificial intelligence work in suburban Chicago, will be twice as fast as originally planned. Intel said the computer will exceed 2 exaflops, meaning the ability to perform 2 quintillion - or 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 - calculations per second.

Intel had originally committed to deliver the $500 million computer this year with 1 exaflop of performance, but manufacturing delays forced it to postpone delivery until next year.

Meanwhile Argonne officials asked Nvidia and AMD for a smaller system built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a test system to continue developing software technologies for the delayed machine.