Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

China's 64bit Homegrown CPU 361

Posted by michael from the enter-the-dragon dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "EE Times is reporting on China's BLX IC Design Corp nearing the completion of their first 64-bit CPU. Based on the MIPS instruction set the 500-MHz Godson-2 microprocessor is aimed toward distributed grid computing. To avoid MIPS patent issues, several instructions (unaligned loads and storeds in the 32 bit version) have not been implemented but with the support of over 60 software providers such as Red Flag Linux and the ability to tweak compilers to not use these instructions this should not be a problem. The Godson-1 processor (also patent free) was announced last year and was aimed at the embedded market." The Godson processor line has generally been called Dragon by the Western press.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

China's 64bit Homegrown CPU More

China's 64bit Homegrown CPU

Comments Filter:

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:02PM (#5451095)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Mirror (Score:2, Informative)

      by Isbiten ( 597220 )
      Copy pasted for you, my friend at Slashdot :D

      BEIJING -- Stay tuned: China's first homegrown CPU is about to go 64-bit.

      One of the country's most promising start-ups, BLX IC Design Corp., Ltd., told EE Times Wednesday (March 5) that it is closing in on a 500-MHz microprocessor that it will market toward China's leading server vendors, including Legend Group and Dawning Technology. It would eventually be positioned as the engine of a distributed grid computing network that will be used by public and private firms here.

      The chip is dubbed Godson-2 and is the follow-on to a 32-bit, 266-MHz version released last year that is aimed at the embedded systems market. Both chips are largely based on the MIPS instruction set, but are not fully compatible because they avoid the use of key instructions that would run afoul of MIPS patents.

      BLX has moved quickly to rally Chinese industry support around the architecture, launching an alliance that intends to attract 100 members and create 100 designs within two years. "We already have 60 companies and 15 designs so we are ahead of schedule," said David Shen, chief executive of BLX. "We have started working with Haier, which is the biggest consumer manufacturer in China, and they need a lot of chips."

      All of the 60 companies that have joined are Chinese firms, Shen said, and they range from upstream hardware makers, to consumer giants like Haier, and software providers Red Flag Linux and Great Wall Software Co.

      Godson-2, which has also been translated into English as Dragon or Longxin, has already been prototyped. Samples are expected to roll in the first half of next year. The chip will be binary backward compatible to the 32-bit Godson-1, a path of compatibility first chosen by Advanced Micro Devices in development of its Opteron line.

      Some of the improvements over Godson-1 include a four-issue super-scaler architecture, dynamic branch prediction and a non-blocking cache design to allow for multiple misses in the memory array. The chip will probably be made on a 0.18-micron process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., although Shanghai's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. is also being considered.

      Planning for Godson-3

      Even though Godson-2 hasn't been officially rolled out, researchers at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a government research group that first designed the Godson architecture before licensing it to BLX, are already thinking about a Godson-3. The core design will be similar. But more features should improve its standing.

      "By the end of next year, we hope we can add in multiprocessor support and on-chip secondary cache. If these features are added, the power consumption may be around 10 watts," said Tang Zhimin, a senior ICT engineer who headed up the Godson project. The power budget for Godson-2 is around 5 watts, based on a 1.8V core and 3.3V I/O.

      Also under consideration are SIMD for multimedia processing and multithreading support. "We are also looking at how to integrate multithreading with our current superscalar architecture," Tang said.

  • US or online vendors? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by intermodal ( 534361 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:05PM (#5451140) Homepage Journal
    I wouldnt mind playing around with some of these. Also: how is availability here or in china for related hardware and motherboards?
    • My thoughts exactly. Sounds like it could be a viable C3 competitor-- cheap and cool-running, and Linux-friendly, with the added benefit of being able to slap "64-bit" on the label.

      I'll try any architecture once....
      • plus its got the cache to be worthwhile. I find myself presently switching to a dual Pentium Pro because the my 900 MHz Duron has such a small cache that compiling is too bloody slow. These as it said in the article have 1MB of cache. Let's see someone else match that on an inexpensive chip.

  • DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:06PM (#5451148)
    Hopefully the Chinese will leave DRM out of their chips and give people looking for a "free" CPU a competitive option to the crippled intel/AMD CPUs.

    • Re:DRM? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 )
      Of course, I assume you're using the DRM buzzword to describe TCPA, which is something different entirely.

      But how would a chinese chip with no DRM be any different from an Intel chip with DRM disabled?

      • Re:DRM? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by supabeast! ( 84658 )
        "Of course, I assume you're using the DRM buzzword to describe TCPA, which is something different entirely."

        I meant DRM in general. Palladium, TCPA, or just processor ID numbers.

        "But how would a chinese chip with no DRM be any different from an Intel chip with DRM disabled?"

        It's the slippery-slope theory. intel chips might allow you to disable DRM at first, and then just make it mandatory at some point. Buying from a manufacturer that leaves it out entirely means that other companies always have to keep that competitor in mind.
      • But how would a chinese chip with no DRM be any different from an Intel chip with DRM disabled?

        In the future there will be no difference. They'll both be illegal.

    • Re:DRM? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by binaryDigit ( 557647 )
      Hopefully the Chinese will leave DRM out of their chips and give people looking for a "free" CPU a competitive option to the crippled intel/AMD CPUs.

      How are Intel and/or AMD chips "crippled"? Are you referring to cpu id's? How would the "Dragon" be "free" and how could it be competitive running at 500mhz?

      Of course there is the ultimate irony of using DRM and China in the same sentence.

      • Re:DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:31PM (#5451400)
        "How are Intel and/or AMD chips "crippled"?"

        They will be when DRM becomes mandatory.

        "...how could it be competitive running at 500mhz?"

        Intel thought the same thing about AMD for a long time. Then the K6-2/450 was released, it sold like crazy, and AMD actually beat intel in sales for one quarter. After that intel startking kicking their R&D's ass to get better CPUs out quicker, because competion had kicked in. It might take a while, but the Chinese have plenty of resources, and they WILL get to a point where their CPUs are competitive with American CPUs.

        • Re:DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by stratjakt ( 596332 )
          >> They will be when DRM becomes mandatory.

          I get tired of hearing that phrase. Do you really think the government is going to mandate TCPA technology? Yeah I know some crackpot sponsored a bill, but it was long since blown out of the water.

          That is, however, something that's very likely in China.

          As for Intel/AMD/VIA/Transmeta/IBM/Motorola, you think they'll all conspire together against you to make sure you use TCPA? They're competitors. If Intel made TCPA platforms that couldnt be disabled, AMD would pick up 100% of the market that doesnt want it.

          It just doesnt make any sense why people are so eager trust the Chinese govermnent as if they're some kind of savior for freedom of thought. I'd be very wary of what the Red Chinese would like to force into everyones desktop box.
        • Intel thought the same thing about AMD for a long time ..... but the Chinese have plenty of resources, and they WILL get to a point where their CPUs are competitive with American CPUs

          We haven't even seen performance #'s with these chips. To think that they could go from copying a 500mhz chip to producing chips that can keep up with 3ghz x86 chips (and this is assuming that the x86 market stands still for a few years) seems to me a bit of a stretch. I just believe that they have the tech horsepower yet to be that competitive.

          • Re:DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Daniel Phillips ( 238627 )
            To think that they could go from copying a 500mhz chip to producing chips that can keep up with 3ghz x86 chips (and this is assuming that the x86 market stands still for a few years) seems to me a bit of a stretch.

            Funny, I recall almost precisely the same thing being said about Japanese dram production, round about the time of 16K (that's bits) drams.

        • Re:DRM? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by poot_rootbeer ( 188613 )
          They will be when DRM becomes mandatory.

          IF. Not when, IF.

          Don't be such a fatalist.

      • How would the "Dragon" be "free" and how could it be competitive running at 500mhz?

        It's for grid/cluster computing. As long as it's sufficiently cheaper than other processors relative to its performance, that's fine. And if it has good power consumption, you can put a lot of them into a small space. And 64 bit support is important in and of itself; I'd buy an Athlon64 today even if it cost the same as an AthlonXP and ran more slowly.

      • How are Intel and/or AMD chips "crippled"? Are you referring to cpu id's?

        Both the upcoming Hammer series as well as Intel chips starting with the Centrino will be "featuring" the necessary hardware for MS's Palladium scheme.

    • Re:DRM? (Score:5, Informative)

      by zmooc ( 33175 ) <{ten.coomz} {ta} {coomz}> on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:59PM (#5451696) Homepage
      DRM functionality on a CPU does not cripple anything. It's the encryption of the media that may cripple the functionality you may have with regard to data from others. And it's the software/OS that has the option to use it.

      DRM only adds functionality like controlling what recipients are to allow to do with emails - just disable any functionality to forward emails which contain confidential data. Don't want others to use your picture for other purposes than viewing it on your website? Possible. Lost your Palm with those rather private pictures on it? No problem. And ofcourse digital media will no longer be copyable directly... but digital media will become a lot cheaper sometime in the future - the price is mainly due to the expensive technology used to create them; expensive studios, 3D-software, special-fx-software, videocamera's etc. are expensive but get cheaper and cheaper. This will not only drive the price of the media down (which will definately raise the volume) but bring a lot more on the market since it'll become a lot cheaper to make things for everyone. Especially with bandwith getting cheaper.

      Now the things that you DO have to fear:

      • DRM incompatibilities between different systems - you may need a lot of different plugins in that case... this may happen if e.g. Real first starts adding DRM to their realmedia, MS then comes up with their own passport-based shit and then finally some standards committee comes up with an open standard which is way too late
      • Closed standards - if Real of MS or whoever comes up with a closed standard which will only be available by using their software, us Linux users will be fucked. This may well happen since most average windows-using internetuser won't hesitate to install all this software and therefore market-penetraion won't be a problem as long as the software is free.
      • Patents on DRM-systems - Open Source would be locked out then. At least in the USA.
      • DRM becoming a requirement before about everybody has the hardware. And then still your old PC won't be able to open DRM-protected media since it a secure data-path has to be built into just about everything from the memory and the CPU all the way to the last peripherals.
      • DRM forcing no-fast-forward on you so you have to watch all the commercials.
      • Data-recovery not being though about - losing data due to a lost key or something would be bad. Something to solve this problem should be implemented. With regard to history in the future this will also be really important; without it the 21st century will be a very dark age in history!
      • The government or some large company having master-keys.
      • Expensive audits required to check for leaks driving the price of hardware (which will get a lot more complex anyway) up.
      • The first DRM-hardware like speakers and LCD-monitors not using wireless transmission by default:) For a really safe data-path, the DRM-decription hardware will have to be in your speakers and monitor so let's hope a wireless receiver will be built on the DRM-chip by default so we'll get cheap wireless peripherals and won't need all those cables anymore:) (everyhing will have to be powered, though. At least it'll safe CPU-cycles:)

      And then offcourse one can still record the analog output of the tv, monitor or speakers but for many applications it'd be really usefull, however.

    • Re:DRM? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Americans buying Chinese CPUs to protect their civil liberties? Now that would be rich...

      On the other hand, you never know [theregister.co.uk] what they might do.

    • While the CPU may not implement Digital Rights Management, I have a BIG worry there may be backdoors in the CPU architecture that might allow the Chinese government to monitor Internet usage by end users with the appropriate monitoring program.

      Far fetched? Given China's aversion to foreign web sites and the fact China is still an authoritarian government this very idea is not out of the question.

  • Pff. (Score:3, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:08PM (#5451171) Homepage Journal

    64 bits? Maybe now someone will actually be able to calculate how much tea is meant when someone says "..all the tea in China".
    • Actually, it's just so they can calculate how many yen they have in their bank account.

      • Re:Pff. (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        thats japan you spastic
    • Nah; this is so they can calculate how long it will take to mine on the moon.

    • Re:Pff. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Cumstien ( 637803 )
      To really prove its power, the chip would have to demonstrate that it has "all the tea in China" and "none of the tea in China" at the same time.

      That and someone would have to write a bunch of 64 bit software.

  • China's Chip (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hhawk ( 26580 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:09PM (#5451184) Homepage Journal
    I think this shows 3 points

    1) Free and easily ported OS allows them to have a reasonable non-standard processors.

    2) US restrictions on exporting high powered chips and other computer parts are easily diluted by open standards.

    3) Test, over time, in the market place the use of cheap open chips vs. more expensive perhaps more cutting edge chips (from the west). Do you use 1 or 2 AMD or Intel chips costing 700 USD or 5 or 6 Dragon/Godson 2 chips costing? $5 or $50 (etc).

    Re #3, an engineer can tell you which is "best" but only the market can pick the real winner.

    • Re:China's Chip (Score:3, Insightful)

      by binaryDigit ( 557647 )
      1) Free and easily ported OS allows them to have a reasonable non-standard processors.

      Agreed. One of the reasons I love NetBSD.

      2) US restrictions on exporting high powered chips and other computer parts are easily diluted by open standards.

      Well I don't know if I'd call a watered down 500mhz MIPS based chip "high powered". Maybe once you lash 128 of them together you'll have a decently powered box, but individually, it's way less than yesterdays tech.

      3) Test, over time, in the market place the use of cheap open chips vs. more expensive perhaps more cutting edge chips (from the west). Do you use 1 or 2 AMD or Intel chips costing 700 USD or 5 or 6 Dragon/Godson 2 chips costing? $5 or $50 (etc).

      Not a good comparison I think. It costs $200 RETAIL for an Athlon 2400MP. Now home much supporting chips, power, etc would you need to put together 5 of those Dragons to get at the same fudged clock rate, assuming of course you're doing things that a parallizable enough to counter the loss in raw clock rate. There are other "non open" chips that are alternatives that cost less/run cooler/etc. I don't see how an "Open" chip helps at all here. Plus how is the Dragon "open"? They "steal" another companies tech and explicitly work around any licensing issues. That's "open"?

      • Re:China's Chip (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:52PM (#5451617)
        Actually, MIPS asm _is_ an open standard and they were careful to not use the few instructions that were covered by patents.

        • Re:China's Chip (Score:3, Insightful)

          by tetra103 ( 611412 )
          Wholy crap! Here's a most informative post that dismisses half of all these garbage posts...and it gets modded down to a 0? Once again, you slashdot moderators are morons!!!! Point and case...China took an open standard and implemented it. I commend them for using an open standard. Would it have been better that they created their own bastardized microcode language? Instead of you fools ripping on China for *stealing* someones idea, maybe you should be ripping on Intel for continuing to make ugly ass processors. I can't say anything bad about AMD since they at least try bring order to the ugly world of Intel.

      • Well I don't know if I'd call a watered down 500mhz MIPS based chip "high powered". Maybe once you lash 128 of them together you'll have a decently powered box, but individually, it's way less than yesterdays tech.

        I'm wondering how many computer users need the power of 128 64-bit CPUs to get their work done? On the desktop, my own observation has been that most of the raw CPU power growth during the past several years is being used for entertainment or GUI eye candy.

        Certainly, there is a class of computable problems that comes in reach only with lots and lots of CPU horsepower. But to dismiss this CPU, created at this early stage in China's development as a chip-maker, seems short-sighted. This CPU will be useful for lots of tasks. And we haven't heard the last of these guys.

      • FYI 500Mhz/64bit/1mb cache is fairly close to the top end of what you can buy from everyone's favorite MIPS-based vendor, SGI. I think the top end from SGI is an R14000(A?) at 700Mhz with (1?2?)Mb of cache. [Yeah, you can tell I keep real on top of the cpus in machines that cost more than my annual salary in most cases. ;)] c.f. the Fuel line of workstations.
    • 1. Better way of saying it:
      MIPS is taught in almost every computer architecture course, is well understood, and already has a following abd design standards for embedded to enterprise level, and the port was done previously for similar chips. The ease to build a MIPS cpu and existing software base is likely more important.

      2. Dragon is not a high-performance chip. However US chips are expensive at even low-end in China's currency. This chip, while not speedy, is cheap and extremely easy to design off of.

      3. Not all processes can be distrubted well. It depends entirely on the task and on the architecture. A large multiprocessor system needs a good bus. A shared-bus will saturate but is cheap, a point-to-point is expensive but better. These are embedded CPUs, so a good multiprocessor system isn't likely. A distributed system is possible, but not resonable for most tasks and the software is very complex.

      Their market will pick it because it will be cheap, pushed by the government, and the West doesn't have a stronghold. Many embedded chips are extremely cheap already and most companies wont make the switch due to power players and more confidence in availablity (can complain to a company, can't to China).

  • Welcome to the future... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by asparagus ( 29121 ) <koonce@NOSPAM.gmail.com> on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:10PM (#5451192) Homepage Journal
    If you're one a million, there's a thousand people just like you in China.

    Even though massive portions of the Chinese population are poor farmers, the contingent that has adopted the Internet is (as a result of being a smaller portion of a larger population) far beyond their US counterparts.

    The Internet allows for capitalism on global scale to be much easier. Up until now, the US has maintained the lead by appropriating the smartest people from other countries (H1-B's, etc.).

    However, we're about to see the trailing edge of this trend, where the smart kids stay at home. Already, one of the top 4 software development groups is based in India.

    To all you genius programmers: you're good. But are you good enough to outhack half a dozen Chinese guys working for half your salary?

    I predict that within 10 years, half the US programming market will have gone to these overseas firms.

    Anybody have any current data on this trend?

    -Brett

    • Re:Welcome to the future... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:15PM (#5451243)
      To all you genius programmers: you're good. But are you good enough to outhack half a dozen Chinese guys working for half your salary?

      I predict that within 10 years, half the US programming market will have gone to these overseas firms.

      Been there, done that.

      [yourdon.com]
      Ed Yourdon's "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer"

      and the sequel

      Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer [yourdon.com]

    • Re:Welcome to the future... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Right here [businessweek.com].
    • Even though you're a little OT, I agree with you completely. I'm only a year into IS, and I'm already looking for another career. Within my lifetime, programmers will be paid minimum wage...
    • That's okay, when I lose my job to the Chinese I'll just become an Open Source coder on welfare.
    • But are you good enough to outhack half a dozen Chinese guys working for half your salary?

      Considering that adds up to three times my salary, I think my job is safe.
    • Oh yeah? Well I predict 2/3rds of the US programming market will dry up within the next 3 years because of Free Software. Capitalism just can't compete with freedom.

    • Re:Welcome to the future... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @04:19PM (#5451892) Homepage
      The United States have been preaching "economical openness" for more than 2 decades now I think. "Do you want US aid? Open your economy ...". Quite a few times this worked against the country implementing the measure, but most of the times it worked well for the US (as its very competitive merchandise flooded those markets). There are some areas in which openness works against the US - like CS jobs.

      I believe that more and more jobs will be exported to India, but probably not China, because of the language barrier.

      Now I'm all for openness myself - I just believe that it *has* to be applied both ways.

    • Being that the going rate for Chinese contract coders is between $10-20 and my take-home pay is $13/hr (plus a *lot* of stock), I think the chance of getting half a dozen of them to work for half my salary is pretty damn low -- and would be even at my old, pre-bust ($35/hr) pay rate.

      IIRC, Russian contractors are somewhat more expensive -- $20-30/hr -- and Indian contractors even more expensive than that, in the range of $30-40/hr, but with less of a reputation for leaking code.

      (My out-of-state short-term contract rates -- $70/hr -- may be forced to change, but since those mostly come in to play when someone calls me in to help maintain software I wrote previously, I doubt it).

  • Nice power consumtion... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:12PM (#5451217)
    According to the article it's only a 5W with an old 0.18um process.

    Godson-3 with SMP support and on-die cache will use only 10W while Intel Itanium2 uses 130W.
    • Sheesh, I'd buy it just for that! The heat dissapation must be not too much. The cooling would be minimal, no loud whines in the machine! Damn. I'd like to be able to play around with a system that has these chips, and test it out for myself.

  • DSP Chip announced yesterday (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:14PM (#5451239) Homepage
    Don't forget the DSP chip announced Yesterday [com.com]. This is really bad news for TI, as the chinese market for cell phones is growing much faster than US and almost saturated Europe.
  • It would be interesting to see performance #'s on these things. They're "only" running at 500mhz, so how do they compare to other MIPS based cpu's? Basically, just how good is there engineering. It's nice for the Chinese to have a home grown cpu to use in their home grown machines, but so far it looks like a major yawn in relation to the overall cpu market.
    • It would be interesting to see performance #'s on these things. They're "only" running at 500mhz, so how do they compare to other MIPS based cpu's? Basically, just how good is there engineering. It's nice for the Chinese to have a home grown cpu to use in their home grown machines, but so far it looks like a major yawn in relation to the overall cpu market.

      Tell that to SGI. They're the ones that own MIPS Technologies. All SGI-machines that run IRIX runs on MIPS-processors and they do it damn well. The latest chip is a 600MHz, but those 600MHz can't be compared to Intel/AMD-MHz since the architecture is different.

      Also these machines consume a fraction of the power that Intel/AMD does, I think the latest Pentium weighs in at about 130W and the latest (R14000 or R16000) at 16W, and in this case bigger is not better.
      This means that You can put a lot of CPU's in one machine and get less powerconsumtion and less heat.
      Combine this with SGI's kickass architecture [sgi.com] with good interconnect and You've got a really good machine. SGI has no equal when it comes to fluid dynamics calculations as an example. No, linux doesn't come close (yet), although the Altrix [sgi.com] looks promising.

      And yes, I know, SGI is too expensive to justify the cost in most cases. Unfortunatly.

      .haeger

      • I wasen't talking in the broad sense of systems development. I was just curious to see how their MIPS chip compared to other MIPS implementations to get a sense for just how good their engineering was. After all, just because it's a 500mhz chip doesn't mean that it performs the same as a 500mhz R14k. Notice that I put quotes around "only".

  • Is China the next Japan? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:16PM (#5451260) Homepage
    People used to hate products like electronics that came out of Japan. They used to be considered cheap crappy imitations. Now Japan is one of the most respected countries producing electronics, if not the best.

    So may China be next? China has a reputation for developing cheap goods and electronic equipment, but they seem to be getting better and better. Maybe someday soon they will be producing electronics as good, if not better, than any other country. The added benefit is that China doesn't follow all the same patent and copyright issues as other countries so they are truly free to innovate and compete. This coupled with Chinas new more positive view on Captitalism and China could become the new super power.
    • China will be a world super power, but their timeframe in that spot won't be too long. The inevitable population crunch that will occur from decades of single-child only rules coupled with the fact that parents will do just about anything to have a male heir, including exporting or killing their female babies means that the population is going to drastically shrink from current highs even in our own lifetimes.
      • Personally, I think China will fall from grace for the same reason as Japan: an inflexible, non merit based system. In fact, you can already see that government owned corporations in China are unable to compete; most of the growth in high tech products in the past 10 years has increased the marketshare of foreign owned companies. In absolute dollar terms, Chinese companies have more or less held steady, and in terms of percentage of the overall market, have fallen sharply.
      • Your point about a population crunch may or may not be valid and the reason I question it is that China is reputed to have created about 250 million people living outside of the official society, a black-population if you will (a la black market not whatever racist crap just popped into some trolls head). As long as they have that number of people outside of control a population crucnh is unlikely except for in the official figures. Personally I await the day these people arrive in Bejing together and ask the government if they would like to mow them all down with their tanks or reconsider where they are going with their nation. Also it is currently estimated that the population should peak in 2050 at 1.6 billion, and as for a population decline, who knows but China could well have a far longer run in the limelight than you forsee.

  • Wow... (Score:2)

    by x136 ( 513282 )
    China is starting to sound like an interesting place to be.

    Err, aside from the whole "oppressive communist government" thing they've got going on over there, that is.
  • 64-bit, RISC, 1MB L2 Cache, and just as plump and juicy as when it was picked. Mmmm-hmm, that's good eatin'!!! :)
  • I'd love to find an offbeat processor like this on a board which still accepted standard PCI cards, or at least a few USB peripherals.

    Does anyone know if this, or another like it, will ever be available stateside with an ATX-mountable motherboard?

  • The only difference between the tech market and clothing, shoes, steel, rail and other industries is the day the pink slips went out and the doors shuttered.

  • Wait a minute.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ACK!! ( 10229 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:24PM (#5451327) Journal
    They use linux right...

    How hard is it to create a new version of linux for a new CPU like this?

    I am no kernel hacker but doesn't there have to be certain hooks for the CPU included for a port to be successful?

    How do they get an OS (linux or whatever really) running on this thing?

    • Re:Wait a minute.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:47PM (#5451564) Homepage Journal
      You can do a simple (non-optimised) kernel port to a fresh (but well behaved) CPU in 1-2 weeks if you know what you are doing and you already have a GCC port available - a production port is probably more like 6-months or more.

      Actually porting GLIBC is a lot more work than the kernel.

      Porting a kernel while debugging a new compiler for a new CPU architecture is a LOT more work than doing either (I know this from sad experience :-)

  • Chinese article? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by saihung ( 19097 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:24PM (#5451330)
    Does anyone have a link to the announcement in Chinese, or to the Chinese company's site? I'm especially curious to see how they got the name "Godson", since there's no simple Chinese translation for the word "god". If the Chinese term is tian1zi3, which is suspect it is, then it really means "Son of Heaven", another term for the emperor.

    • Re:Chinese article? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Yuan-Lung ( 582630 )
      Try this [ccidnet.com] article. Since I can't really read simplified Chinese I am having a hard time reading through it. -_-|||

  • MIPS pantent issue (Score:5, Informative)

    by brejc8 ( 223089 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:31PM (#5451415) Homepage Journal
    I did post the story but the last sentence which was cut was very important.(Original [slashdot.org]).
    "Although there are no patent issues MIPS have been known to be very [e-insite.net] aggressive [man.ac.uk] toward people who try to create compatible systems."

  • This sounds famailar (Score:3, Informative)

    by mao che minh ( 611166 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:33PM (#5451434) Journal
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/05/202320 0&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=103 Hmmm......
  • This is just one more example of how China is going to blow right past the U.S. in the next 20 years. While we are busy sticking our heads up our own assess with "intellectual property" lawsuits China will be busy creating new prodcuts and new applications for existing ware. Also, c.f., Lunar mining, et al.

    • You're right. I completely dislike the Chinese government, so I hate to say this... but I believe that China and many parts of Southeast Asia are going to blow past us (the USA) within a few decades. Why?

      As you said, we've got our heads up our asses with not only intellectual property nonsense, but also with the idea that certain businesses have some sort of God-given right to stay in business no matter how flawed or antiquated their business plans are.

      While we're stifling innovation in the US with our insane amount of copyright laws, the Chinese will be the ones innovating.

      You're also likely right about space travel. There is a good chance the Chinese will pass us in that field as well. It wouldn't surprise me if China is the country that makes it to Mars. I get the sense that they're willing to make "sacrifices," and push forward even after a spacecraft faces a disaster rather than halting their program for years.

  • FINALLY... (Score:4, Funny)

    by cygnus ( 17101 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:45PM (#5451546) Homepage
    now we FINALLY know what the next PowerMac will run on. :)

  • Longxin? English? (Score:3, Funny)

    by lwbecker2 ( 530894 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @03:51PM (#5451604)
    "...The chip is dubbed Godson-2 and is the follow-on to a 32-bit, 266-MHz version released last year that is aimed at the embedded systems market.
    ...snip...
    Godson-2, which has also been translated into English as Dragon or Longxin, has already been prototyped. "

    uh... since when is "Longxin" English? no entry in the Dictionary [m-w.com]
    • Probably should have been written as "or Romanized as Longxin" (ie: translating the characters sort of by pronouncation/description into something that can be written using Roman/Latin characters).

      Dragon is probably the closest meaning/definition translation of the word.

      I could be wrong though. :|
  • Actually, SPARC would have been a far better option, since it's a 100% open spec paltform. The license cost just $99 [sparc.org]!!! Amazing..
  • umm.... 5 dollars a cpu = HUGE multistacks of little mobos... I said this the first time the dragon [slashdot.org] was on slashdot.

    Please say "Blah Blah, It isn't cost efficient." If you can run a 500mhz Dragon for 5 watts, and an Itanium for 130, why not run 26x500mhz Dragons? or kick it up a notch for 32x500mhz.

    Also, if you need something real to look at and you can't understand why this is a good idea, have a look at a PC104 board.

    Now Since I've discussed this in the desktop/server cluster end of the spectrum, imagine how this will help portable/wearable/embedded device technology, if their Desktop CPU is planned to run at 5 watts, imagine their portable CPU.

  • Sounds like a winner.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by digital photo ( 635872 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @04:01PM (#5451724) Homepage Journal

    From the sound of it, the Godson chips will be lower powered in terms of performance to current US chips. However, I find the energy consumption to be very attractive. Ie, 5 watts and 10 watts for 266Mhz 500 Mhz respectively. Scaling up linearly, that's still just 20 watts of power consumption for a 2Ghz chip.

    But what I'm thinking is that China is aiming for is low cost and low power consumption chips. Ie, can be used in portable hardware and/or massively parallel setups.

    Granted, they can't SMP the chips in hardware, but with a Linux cluster of these, they could quite readily setup a powerful computing cluster.

    Personally, I'm glad that they are designing their own chips. It would be nice to see more competition outside of just the big two.

    The way I see it, if they produce these chips at low prices($15-$50), at such low power consumption levels, I could easily see myself building many small nodes of them. Maybe now, I can POVray just ever so faster... :)

  • Yeah, but can you build a... (Score:5, Funny)

    by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @04:03PM (#5451740) Journal
    ... Beowurf cruster out of them?

    Oh, my goodness. I'm so sorry!

  • Marketing Literature (Score:3, Funny)

    by nick_davison ( 217681 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @04:23PM (#5451932)
    GODSON-2, now 50%* faster at performing miracles than our original GODSON-1 (Jesus) line without the overheating issues associated with the FIRSTANGEL (Lucifer) series.

    Note: 50% speed improvement is valid. PhilosopherMark2003 does not take in to account issues that need to be addressed in the new millenium and therefore produces unbalanced results in favor of BhuddaTechnologies's processor line.
  • From the article:

    "The chip will be binary backward compatible to the 32-bit Godson-1, a path of compatibility first chosen by Advanced Micro Devices in development of its Opteron line."

    What a load of horse. Sun did this ~10 yrs ago with the SPARC -> UltraSPARC transition, the PowerPC and POWER specs also include such compatibility, and if I'm not mistaken MIPS themselves did this as well also ~10 yrs ago. Some reporter there really doesn't know his stuff.
  • Given the fact that so much high tech research and development was made possible through copious use of acronyms, and that acronyms require an alphabet and not idiograms, I applaud China's accomplishment! :-)

  • Dragon? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zazi ( 601795 )
    Am I the only one who gets a laugh out of what the west calls this processor? It's made in Communist China... Communism = bad... USSR... Red Dragon... ahhh forget it.

  • Leapfrog in technology? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nemeosis ( 259734 ) on Thursday March 06, 2003 @07:28PM (#5453797)
    This chip might be an interesting move. We have seen leap frogs in technology adoption in developing countries.

    Examples:
    1. US homes are still mostly connected via copper phone lines. Developing countries which are barely starting to lay out their communications network infrastructure are laying out fiber optic lines. Whether this is good or not is still yet to be seen. Fabric switches are still incredibly expensive.

    2. Cell phone technologies in Japan, Korea, and other asian countries are connected via newer and more advanced 3G CDMA digital technology. For some countries, its much cheaper to build a wireless infrastructure than it is to lay out ground cables. China is pushing their own CDMA technology.

    So, with this new 64-bit CPU, maybe China will make the leapfrog into 64-bit computing. They will have a Linux system capabable of handling a 64-bit instruction set. Assuming of course, that Microsoft doesn't shutter some kind of shady deal with the Chinese government, to have them all running their servers on Windows 2000/.Net operating systems. The company making the chip will have to speed up the CPU though, but maybe they can follow Moore's Law and double every 18 months.

    Who knows, maybe this will cause a revolution in China. The population will be running their systems on a more advanced 64-bit Linux system running MIPS-like instruction set. Then again.. maybe not? The market will decide.

Slashdot Top Deals

Neutrinos have bad breadth.

Close