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China's 64bit Homegrown CPU
Posted by
michael
on Thu Mar 06, 2003 02:01 PM
from the enter-the-dragon dept.
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.
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Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
http://caribou.intercarve.net/~danheskett/mirrors
Nice architecture (Score:1, Insightful)
(http://www.pdrap.org/ | Last Journal: Monday January 21 2002, @02:40PM)
yeah nice but performance ? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.johnjones.me.uk/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 04, @06:34PM)
MHz is not everything I wonder how much of a performance penalty e.g. not having unaligned loads actually is and compared to a true MIPS core what the penalty
anyone got basic benchmarks ?
regards
John Jones
Reason for MIPS r0 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.anotherbear.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 25 2003, @03:29PM)
Maybe the could just have used the extra space for a proper move instruction so R0 is freed.
The MIPS architecture already has a proper 'move' instruction without using r0: r12 = r8 | r8, or r12 = r8 | 0 (zero specified as immediate). The r0 is frozen at 0 so you can do negations (for which ARM uses 'rsb' or reverse subtraction) and other things where zero must be the first argument.
Homecloned, you mean... (Score:1, Interesting)
US or online vendors? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Monday April 19 2004, @09:54AM)
DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:5, Informative)
(http://zmooc.net/)
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:
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.
Pff. (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.grub.net/blog/index.html | Last Journal: Wednesday June 27, @08:48AM)
64 bits? Maybe now someone will actually be able to calculate how much tea is meant when someone says "..all the tea in China".
China's Chip (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.hawknest.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 05 2004, @04:11PM)
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:5, Informative)
Welcome to the future... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.universe42.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 07 2003, @08:52AM)
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)
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:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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.
Where are the IP lawyers? (Score:1, Troll)
(http://www.whydomytitsitch.com/)
Nice power consumtion... (Score:5, Interesting)
Godson-3 with SMP support and on-die cache will use only 10W while Intel Itanium2 uses 130W.
DSP Chip announced yesterday (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://blog.stadil.com/)
Performance #'s? (Score:2)
Is China the next Japan? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.mongeese.org/)
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.
Wow... (Score:2)
(about:blank)
Err, aside from the whole "oppressive communist government" thing they've got going on over there, that is.
Had me a hydroponic processor, once. (Score:2)
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JonCiesla | Last Journal: Thursday December 05 2002, @02:46PM)
Are they available for general use? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://brianm.org/)
Does anyone know if this, or another like it, will ever be available stateside with an ATX-mountable motherboard?
Bye, Bye Tech Industry (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.dufftech.net/)
Wait a minute.. (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday June 23 2006, @12:04PM)
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)
(http://www.taniwha.com/nospam.jpg | Last Journal: Thursday July 24 2003, @05:22PM)
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)
MIPS pantent issue (Score:5, Informative)
(http://brej.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday May 07 2006, @07:57AM)
"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)
(Last Journal: Sunday April 11 2004, @07:41PM)
Bad news for Intel and AMD (Score:1, Interesting)
-1 Redundant, but still... (Score:2, Redundant)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday December 23 2005, @06:30PM)
Say what? (Score:1, Interesting)
Since when do the commies give a flying about patents and other such things? And I don't suspect any of their clients would either. So why waste your time on making it patent-free?
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.cs.curtin.edu.au/~kuiperba)
FINALLY... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Longxin? English? (Score:3, Funny)
...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]
With SPARC they wouldn't have any patent issue... (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://maitas.blogspot.com/)
MICRO computing, Multithreading, Multiprocessing (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://support.microsoft.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday June 27 2004, @06:34PM)
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.
Fast b/c Moon silicon (Score:1)
(http://slashdot.org/)
<silly>
I think it will be fast because they're going to build it with silicon from the moon [slashdot.org].
Since there is 1/6 gravity on the moon, light can move faster so the chip will be 6x faster than anything us Earth suckers can make.
</silly>
Sounds like a winner.. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.wingedpower.com/ | Last Journal: Monday June 09 2003, @07:18PM)
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)
(Last Journal: Monday December 20 2004, @01:32PM)
Oh, my goodness. I'm so sorry!
Marketing Literature (Score:3, Funny)
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.
backwards compatibility (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Tuesday November 30 2004, @04:12AM)
"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.
Since when has China fretted over patents? (Score:1)
The day the Red Architecture will awake... (Score:1)
(http://tofz.org/)
no DRM (oops! "trusted content management" or whatever new name it was given...) is obviously to take place in their stuff, is it?
maybe this is the anwser for knocking-down those greedy majors interests in making computers to evolve to protect their own private interests?
go China! i'm ready to get my RedPC already!
OK, I said I'd never do it... (Score:1)
(http://w1rww.homelinux.net/)
NO, I'm not going to do it!
Congratulations, China! (Score:2)
(http://seankelly.biz/)
I thought (Score:1)
ill repute (Score:1)
(http://www.zerotosuperhero.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 28 2007, @04:03PM)
Dragon? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm curious... (Score:2)
(http://www.stardotgeek.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday March 18 2003, @10:49AM)
Leapfrog in technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Linux & non US h/w will save us from DRM/Palla (Score:1)
(http://www.flsa.org.au/about/committee/it-officer/)
Between India and China there will be around a 1/4 of the world's people. Thier governments won't be hamstrung by US media inspired laws that lock up content, takes away people right to fair use and most importantly put $$ into the pockets of American companies.
Do you really think that a paltry USD$400m "donation" by BillG to India will convince a *billion* people to use Windows - no way !
Do you really think that China will put Palladium h/w controls into their PC's ?? , or DRM limitations into hardrives ?? No way !
My prediction is that within 10 years, if you want to use a computing platform that is truly free (as in speech, not beer) , then you may well be using a Chinese made PC running RedFlag Linux (English edition)
Of course you may have trouble importing these non-DCMA v2 "anti-circumenvention devices" into your Western country , certainly the US, where congress have sold out to big-media , and sadly probably into Australia as well shortly (US and Oz are currently in free trade negotiations and the US want to talk about equitable IP laws..) ;-(
We should all be thankful that the national strategic interests of India and China will happily coincide with the asprirations and ideal of all those who identify with the aims and ideals of the EFF
Like Lessig said at OSCON 2002 , what have YOU done about it ?? - Donate to the EFF !!
And here's how they did it... (Score:1)
To tell you what the real meaning of the "Godson" (Score:2, Informative)
In China, it is normally called as Long Xin, which didn't mean Dragon Hear. As some of you guys know, Long in Chinese means Dragon and Xin means heart. But there is another meanings of Long and Xin, Long reffers to All Chinese People and Xin means chip. So longxin means Chinese Chip!
If you guys want to know the story of developing the chip and if you understand Chinese , you can navigate to the following URLs£
http://www.pconline.com.cn/news/hotpick/hy/1021
http://www.csdn.net/Develop/article/15%5C15461.
To tell you the real meaning of Godson in Chinese (Score:1)
TSMC (Score:1)
(http://katastro.fi/)
Is economy starting to outweigh politics even in China?
eetu.
what kind of yields? (Score:2)
wrong translation for CPU (Score:1)
Re:The beginning (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.reverseengineeredpenguin.com/visaris | Last Journal: Tuesday October 30, @12:56PM)
Everyone in America is complaining about how US firms are employing foreign workings instead of US citizens. Once the foreign market starts to keep pace with / pass up the US, there will be an increased demand for IT workers in those countries. As demand for these workers increases, their salries will increase as well. This means US firms will be less eager to hire foreign workers.
Also, I think the US could use a good kick in the pants when it comes to motivation for product innovation. This may be just what we need.
Re:The beginning (Score:2, Funny)
I'm putting it between the soy milk and the mango lassi.
Re:Since when does China care about US patents? (Score:1)