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China Develops Their Own CPU: The "Dragon Chip"
vaxzilla writes "China's People's Daily
Online is reporting in
this article that the Computer Institution of the Chinese Academy of
Science have developed a new CPU, which they're calling the Dragon Chip.
The report isn't clear on the technical details of the chip, though it
does state, somewhat confusingly, that it, `is based on the RISC
structure, a totally another standard. Therefore, it will not fall into
the intellectual property right trap.' They're running Linux on the chip
and have built a server around it, Soaring Dragon. It looks like China is
starting to tell both Microsoft and Intel to take a hike. Interesting
times are ahead."
Article here:
This server is not slashdotted...yet.
If I had a sig, this is where it would be.
This being not a for-profit fly-by-night sweatshop, but a research institute, rumour has it that they cloned Alpha.
I hope they did, because there is no microprocessor architecture that holds more promise then the Alpha, and it is a shame on the US supposedly pro-competitive, efficient culture that it has been cancelled due to Digital being inefficient in marketing it and then Intel not wanting the competition.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I agree about the Alpha. In fact, nowadays the only decent RISC architectures with some chance for survival are the Power from IBM and SPARC from Sun (with the latter having a bit more chance, because they don't depend on the Wintel world as much as IBM does). HP gave in to Intel as well as Digital.
Too bad because RISC is, in fact, the better technology and it had a formidable start, back in the 80's.
Sigged!
I read an interview with one of the Dragon Chip
project leader (Dr Hu) a few months ago in a magazine. It gives a lot more details if I can
still recall correctly.
The reporter interviewed him after their team booted into Linux successfully with their prototype chip (or I should say FPGA implementation). Follow the common practice, they have written a C simulator for the chip, followed by hardware logic verification with FPGAs. I think the latest news is refering to
the completion of the initial silicon design.
The team focuses on the hardware design. The proposed chip is compatible with the MIPS instruction, IIRC. For the floating point
arithmatic, it follows the IEEE 754 standard. That's why they can boot to Linux to verify their
design quite early on without too much tweaking.
The targeted performance is close to PII. Not too bad for an embedded microprocessor at this moment... But, maybe a bit old when they commerically release it. But, as long as they can find applications into consumer electronics, the chip may get a good life like our good old Z80, HC11... Nevertheless, it is a good achievement consider the fact that the bulk of the team has no previous MCU design experience.
China hasn't been communist for quite a long time; there's plenty of private industry (both local and foreign), and significant disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor. It's essentially a capitalist one-party state. It's still socialist in some ways, though mostly unofficially (a lot of the large private companies are indirectly controlled by people in high places in the government).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The SPARC standard is an open standard, and we allow and encourage clones (Fujitsu has made them in the past, for one example). The license is not anything like open source or community licenses in the linux sense though. It's been around a lot longer than most of those licenses except GPL itself (SPARC was designed to be open from the get go in the late 80's).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The Chinese RMB, on the other hand, is worth a lot less. It's worth 1/8 of a dollar, and average people earn only about 1,000 RMB a month, if they even have a job. A halfway decent, probably barely usable computer costs well over 8,000 RMB, making it out of reach for most workers because they spend most of that money on food and housing anyway.
One reason for the high prices is because of the fact that much of the parts are imported, and only assembled in China under the brands Legend, iBuddie, etc... If this archetecture of chip gets popular in China, more of it will be produced within the nation, making it less expensive, then soon after will come cheaper motherboards, the cases are already made in China anyway... This would mean lower prices, making personal computers within the reach of a lot more Chinese. So, this chip, I say, is a Good Thing(TM), and a step in the right direction.
The distinction is fading quite a bit. Modern x86 chips have RISC cores, but have additional hardware outside the core to translate the CISC instruction set to the core RISC instruction set. On a true RISC chip, the translation from higher-level constructs to lower-level opcodes happens in software at the compilation stage. The functional and performance difference between the two approaches isn't really that huge anymore, since this CISC->RISC translation doesn't slow things down a whole lot.
Now what does slow things down is the hardware having to deal with parallelizing code in the pipeline and avoiding all the variou ssorts of problems that can cause. Both RISC and CISC chips generally do this in hardware. The Itanium is the first to abandon that approach, and say "it's up to the compiler to make sure stuff doesn't mess up when we pipeline." Speeds things up a lot, but makes writing compilers damn near impossible, and writing hand-coded assembler completely impossible.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Ancient Chinese legends explained that the mineral jade was actually petrified dragon semen.(Sorry about the quality of the reference link, I can't find a better one.)
Almost certainly more than you wanted to know.
However, this seems to be a project very dear to the Chinese govt., and I don't suppose they would want to outsource it to Taiwan with whom they could be at war any moment.
UMC and TSMC have started investment heavily in China. There are severeal 12" wafer fab contstructed jointly by Japanese and Chinese companies. There will be no lack of fab capable of producing this chip when it become commercially available.
Taiwan's government is having trouble stopping the Taiwanese semiconductors to move to China.
Maybe because it's not funny?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
China's trade status is 'Most Favored Nation'. While I agree that China shouldn't have it, it isn't a remarkable status. It is not 'best country', it does not mean that the government ignores problems with China.
Most of the world's nations (certainly all of the developed ones) hold 'Most Favored Nation'. All it means is that all Most Favored Nations are entitled to the same trade deals as any other nation. For instance, if the US lowers steel tarrifs for Portugal, then all Most Favored Nations receive the same lowering of steel tarrifs.
Not a badge of special status, it is simply a mark of eligibilty for equitable trade relations. To withdraw (or withhold) the status, removes a nation from the pool of countries who all get the same deal, and allows the US to punish a country economically.
The formal name of the dragon chip is Godson. It is not x86 compliant but MIPS III compliant. The specification is very rough, 0.18um CMOS, 8k data cache and 8k instruction cache, 32 bit integral WORD and 64 bit float WORD. According to the news report, it has some unique character such as buffer overflow protection. The stated performance is ambiguious. One artical said at 12.5Mhz, the integral performance is roughly about half of a 486/50, and the float performance is equal to a 486/50. In the news website, they said it is about a PII. But in the formal report issued by the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology, they claimed at 200Mhz, its performance is about a 180Mhz MIPS R5000 (maybe dual cpu)SGI O2. The highest frequency is 266Mhz. After one year preparation, it will be put into production. I suppose it can't be seen in the retail market and the biggest buyer is surely the Chinese government.
The Naval Academy is a real university, and it's better than most.
Jimmy Carter was trained as an engineer probably moreso and better than the average Slashdot reader who self-identifies as "engineer".
Sheesh. "I hoped this has helped a little." Yeah, right.
You're correct only insofar as it's true that the American public doesn't think much of anyone that smacks of intellectualism and rarely do contemporary candidates emphasize their academic credentials. Carter's status as a real engineer, in fact, worked against him as it was used to validate the view that he was a hopelessly naive scientist/engineer type out of his depth in big-time politics. And, honestly, there was probably truth to that at the time.
However
and
Can you say chinese Palladium?
> i ment is it 100% like RISC, that there isn't anything that is jinxed or
There's no standard that defines what 100% RISC is or not. RISC just means "reduced instruction set computer" but that term is often missused. So (marketing) people want you to know that Pentium-whatever or other X86-compatible CPUs have "RISC inside" and other stupid nonsense.
RISC is (was) a design philosophy - no feature.
> partially incompatible to the way other RISC cpus handle sosme thing...
Err - RISC CPUs don't have to be compatible at all (instruction set wise) - a SPARC CPU won't process software written vor ARM CPUs. And how things are handled internally doesn't matter for users and software developers.
As a resident of Taiwan, I can tell you that you definitely need to get your vision checked.
Pro-China sentiment increasing in Taiwan? Not in this universe, sir. As the old Mainlander population passes on, the Taiwanese are becoming progressively less interested in the Mainland -- except as a business opportunity -- not more. The only reason 70% of Taiwanese favor maintaining the current status quo is because of Beijing's continued military threats. Absent that, I guarantee you pro-independence numbers would easily top 80%. This is not surprising, considering that less than 15 percent of Taiwanese even consider themselves Chinese, and most of those are the old mainlanders who came over with the KMT.
You may have also have overlooked the fact that the ruling political party happens to be the one with the pro-independence platform (while conversely, the only officially pro-unification party, the New Party, has been tottering on the brink of political extinction for at least the last two years); that the last two Taiwanese presidents have openly advocated Taiwanese independence (are are immensely popular); or that in the most recent national elections, the KMT's bid for a return to power was significantly hindered -- not helped -- by accusations of secret collusions with Beijing. Far from increasing, pro-unification sentiment in Taiwan has in fact found itself increasingly politically isolated in recent years.
And your suggestion that pro-unificationists in Taiwan are increasingly pro-PRC is especially entertaining. It is precisely amongst the most strongly pro-unification Taiwanese -- the old Mainlanders -- that anti-PRC sentiment is the highest.
Pro-PRC sentiment increasing.... {chuckle}
Lee Kai Wen
Taiwan, ROC
If someone wanted to manufacture their own CPU, this makes it pretty easy. SPARC V9 is the 64-bit version.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.