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."

Comments

i wonder why

[jon787]

maybe because they don't like palladium either?

Re:i wonder why

[MikeFM]

Seriously I would buy a processor from them if they didn't include that DRM bullshit while AMD, Intel, and other American companies are including it. Even if they aren't quite as fast for the buck or aren't x86 compatible (is fine as long as they can run Linux). I'd even switch to their CPU as my default development platform.

Wouldn't it be ironic for Americans to have to use Chinese products to remain free?

A serious curiousity question

[A nonymous Coward]

Are the Chinese going to release their mods to the GPLd code when they distribute their version of Linux? Is there anything anybody over here can do about it if they don't? In particular, will the US government, usually real quick to condemn IP violations and theft when there's money involved, lean on the Chinese government to obey the GPL?

It would be interesting to figure out the CPU details from the code they release...

Re:A serious curiousity question

[sphix42]

Of course not. China has 'best country' trade status with us. IP theft from Microsoft etc, human rights issues, communisim are quickly ignored.

Re:A serious curiousity question

[ProfessorPuke]

It's quite likely that most Chinese-government changes to GPL code will make it out, somehow. Firstly, they might want to appear to obey the WIPO regulations they've agreed to. (Not likely to be a big factor in their behavior, though).

Even if they don't feel bound to the license, they still might desire code release- either to take some worldwide market-share from Microsoft (and hurt a leading symbol of US capitalism), or more likely, to benefit from improvements made by generous hackers in Japan, Europe, and America.

And then, if the government STILL doesn't want to release the code, it might filter out anyhow. Its a big country, and even the most draconian restrictions would have trouble intercepting 2 megabytes of nondescript patches. Sure, they might restrict source code access to a small group of closely monitored developers, but then they'd lose much of benefits of Open Source development. (Like the ability to require each of 1 million native computer science students to create a useful kernel improvement to graduate...)

Re:A serious curiousity question

[Jason Earl]

More importantly the Chinese who don't share will find themselves increasingly maintaining patched versions of software that are incompatible with the main branch (and therefore much more expensive to maintain).

Heck, I made some modifications to a GPLed project at one point, and I thought it was too much of a hassle to share. Next thing I knew the software package in question had changed enough that my patches no longer applied cleanly, one of the libraries that my software relied on adopted a new API. To make matters even worse the old version of the library was very tricky to compile by hand.

In short, the next thing I knew it was almost impossible to upgrade the boxes that this software was installed on. If I had shared my work might very well have become part of the mainstream distribution. New installations would have been as easy as installing the RPMs off of the CD.

The Chinese might have enough people working on Linux that they don't need to collaborate with the rest of the world, but my guess is that they would be far better off collaborating with the rest of us than trying to do everything themselves.

Re:A serious curiousity question

[Nihilanth]

here's an interesting scenario. An eastern technology giant lifts restrictions regarding intellectual property concerns, and allows its constituants to build and innovate freely, without the threat of lawsuits or red tape...

It's easy to imagine the intellectual property concerns in the west reaching such a fevered pitch that the worlds intellectual resources actually flee to a situation that dosen't bother as much with the red tape of copyrights and beurauchracy. A "brain-drain", if you will. Perhaps this disregard for intellectual property concerns -does- stem from a basis on stolen technology, but if the end result is a focus more on creative output than on "who gets paid", the people -really- interested in creating will simply go where they can do what they want to do.

Having become accustomed to a certain way of life, those of us insistant upon our rights to download mp3s and try out the latest games before we buy them may find ourselves developing a strong interest in learning chinese.

Re:A serious curiousity question

[Maserati]

Chopstick

Re:A serious curiousity question

[cpeterso]

This is how the BSD licensed projects try to subtly encourage people to share their code changes. People or companies that use BSD code without sharing have a lot more maintenance to do themselves. So instead of using paranoid legal force like the GPL, the BSD projects politely encourage code sharing.

Re:A serious curiousity question

[Baki]

Even if they don't feel bound to the license, they still might desire code release- either to take some worldwide market-share from Microsoft (and hurt a leading symbol of US capitalism),

Ironically, MSFT's condemnation of the GPL as being 'communist' might have gotten the Chinese thinking about it. For them, this condemnation must have sounded as a recommendation.

If China proves it can do without Wintel, it will be a huge example for other parts of the world. In a way, MSFT's 'condemnation' of the GPL might have been the beginning of their end.

Re:A serious curiousity question

[Alex Belits]

USSR didn't spend anything on SDI-related stuff -- it was not considered to be a threat in late 80's when everyone with a brain and outside Raytheon or Lockheed understood that this technology would be ineffective in the case of nuclear war. Russian military-related research and engineering was a self-contained program that did not depend on any imported components, so it would be impossible to "overspend" on it -- it didn't require any "hard" currency at all, and didn't involve an overhead of feeding military-industrial complex's companies and their stockholders. With a country as large as former USSR, physical limitations would prevent government to allocate too large percentage of resources on the military, at the expense of the rest of the economy, so economy (that was also mostly self-contained) had sufficient resources to continue operating as it did in raely 80's. The system however was very fragile, and when Gorbachev's reforms went beyond political doctrines and policies into economy, they broken the existing system withour creating anything usable in its place. USSR continued to exist after that, however the central government became so wrapped in internal bickering and mutual accusations between factions, it simply become irrelevant. At that point local governments (usually more conservative politically and more corrupt) taken over, leaving central government nothing to do but continuing discrediting itself until it became completely irrelevant. USSR dissolution therefore was a purely political process, with only remote relationship to the economy (central government's incompetence in the economy-related reforms was one of the reasons for bickering).

So actually "free trade" inside the country was one of the problems that happened before USSR was dissolved. Ex-Communist politicians adopted libertarian-like doctrine that was heavily pushed by US propaganda (even though it has little to do with how US economy operates), and the combination of massive deregulation, formerly state-owned monopolies, and money in the hand of organized crime and corrupt bureaucracy was the deadly mix for the economy.

dual chip boards

[spineboy]

Will they be called Double Dragons?

Re:dual chip boards

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the entry point of the programs be EnterTheDragon()?

Re:dual chip boards

[cybercuzco]

and of course a 4-way board would be Double Dragon II

MIRROR SITE AVAILABLE

[philam3nt]

PeopleDaily mirrors their own site in English:

• http://www.peopledaily.net/english/
  Article here:
  
• http://www.peopledaily.net/english/200209/27/eng20 020927_104011.html

This server is not slashdotted...yet.

dude, where's my cpu?

[StandardDeviant]

The new chip is rumored to use the rarely seen iterative data fetch instruction (ANDTHN) to retrieve data from ram (really annoyed memory). In keeping with the RISC philosophy, this is the only instruction the cpu supports when interacting with other entities in the system.


(if you haven't seen "dude, where's my car" this will make no sense. so go watch the movie ;))

Re:so the REALLY designed their own chip?

[leandrod]

> If the hardware design habits of the Chinese are anything like their software programming efforts, then the Dragon will be reverse-engineered and rebranded Pentium.

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.

Best quote ever:

[Timmeh]

The person also made a further explanation, saying that China used the US chip in the past. Information security constitutes the first and foremost line in national defence. However, the line was built on the foreign technology and completed with materials from a foreign country, and so we cannot but be worried about it.

You can't tell me that I was the only person who did a double-take when I read that. That must be why the P4 requires so much power, IT'S GOT A SECRET GOVERNMENT TRANSMITTER INSIDE OF IT. Good thing I wrap my case in the same thick tin foil I used for my hats. And to think that my neighbors call me crazy! At least my data isn't being uploaded to a secret government satellite!

Re:Best quote ever:

[Shuh]

That must be why the P4 requires so much power, IT'S GOT A SECRET GOVERNMENT TRANSMITTER INSIDE OF IT.

You don't think they're doing 2.8 Ghz of work in a P4, do you? Dude, that's the frequency of the transmitter's carrier wave!!!

Re:Best quote ever:

[Nihilanth]

that would explain the clock/performance disparity

Re:Best quote ever:

[Malcontent]

I think you read that wrong. Notice the phrase "the line was built on the foreign technology and completed with materials from a foreign country".

So you see by buying chips from intel they are helping the US economy. By building their own chips they are helping their own economy.

The same goes for windows. Everytime a chinese (or any other nationality for that matter) buys a copy of windows money flows out of their country and into the US where we can use it to build bombs so we can bomb the shit out of them when the tehir turn comes around.

The chinese are apparently wise to this scheme. They want to develop their own chips and use linux on it thereby keeping the money inside china helping the chinese companies and people as opposed to sending their money to the US.

It makes perfect sense I am surprised that other countries don't get it. I suspect the reason for that is the influence companies like MS and Intel have in democracies where they can buy politicians to act against the interests of their own countrymen. In a dictatorial communist regime that tactic is not very effective.

I have always wondered why very lucrative industries like operating systems and micro chips are not being actively pursued by other countries. It's not like they are not smart enough considering the some of the best and brightest engineers in this country are chinese, hindu, arab or whatever. Every dollar spent on windows or intel is one less dollar in their country and one more dollar in ours.

"And to think that my neighbors call me crazy! At least my data isn't being uploaded to a secret government satellite!"

I remember during the gulf war of Bush Sr. reading that the US had modified the chips of printers and computers going to Iraq to carry viruses and trojans. Why don't you do a search on google about it. The chinese are not stupid enough to presume that the computers going to china will have the exact same pentiums that you have.

I have no doubt half the computers in iraq, iran saudi arabia, china etc have rigged chips nor do I have any doubt half the software sent to those countries have trojans. It's an easy way to spy.

from the article

[zephc]

"the Dragon Chip is proved to be very sound in performance, steady and reliable in operation and utterly sufficient to meet the working requirement of the server and website"

'utterly sufficient'? is that like 'majestically plain'?

Re:so the REALLY designed their own chip?

[haggar]

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.

More details from a magazine article

[AtomicBomb]

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.

Re:More details from a magazine article

[vaxzilla]

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

Not too bad for an embedded processor? I guess the chip makers do spend so much money on marketing, conditioning people to believe that we need ridiculously fast processes to do useful computing, I shouldn't be surprised by this attitude. For 90% of useful computer work-- including things like web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, programming, e-mail--a processor equivalent to a PII is overkill. In the mid-1990s, the Western world's technology sector was doing just fine with 486s and Pentiums in their desktops. So I'd say that if China's initial attempt at a processor is close to a PII in performance, that's something very noteworthy. They may be starting on the road to their own technological revolution quite a few years behind everyone else, but they're starting it on a lot better footing than we did.

And if China, as I'd imagine they're intending to do, shuts out the likes of Microsoft and Intel from their consumer PC market, that's both a huge blow to those companies and an amazing boon to the Chinese. China has a vast and untapped market, if China chooses to keep that market for itself, their own technology companies will end up very well off--maybe even rivaling in size the Intels and Microsofts of the West.
[]

My VAX 6420 will crush all of your PCs--literally.

China isn't communist

[Trepidity]

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).

No Chinese Palladium?

[Dan Crash]

The article doesn't make any mention of DRM-enabling technologies like Palladium embedded on the Dragon chip. So if you value freedom, support China, I guess.

I dread the day when Chinese citizens talk amongst themselves about the funny things Americans can't do with their computers.

Re:No Chinese Palladium?

[stubear]

So Microsoft can now use GPL'ed software without adhering to the GPL because IP doesn't exist? You did know that the only thing protecting the GPL is copyright, right? Or were you fooled, like so many other slashbots that copyleft was actually a legal principle completely opposite to copyright? GPL requires copyright to exist otherwise it is a meaningless contract over, as you put it, a non-existent "thing", that cannot be enforced.

Re:Intelectual property

[elmegil]

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).

intelectual property?

[JDizzy]

Since when has IP ever been an issue in The peoples Republic of China? They don't obey international laws. They have jet fighter pilots who like to fly too close and crash into USA spy planes. They have a thing for stealling software like we could only imagine in the USA. They have the comfort of not having to worry aout IP-cops in China. They distribute pirate copies of MS code like you could not belive. To read this article and see it talk about being worried about Intel's IP on processor technologies, and then be so naive to claim that since they are based on a RISC arch that they are immune. Ha! The fact is that even RISC's are entangled in IP. The only reason they can get away with certain architecture designes is because China doesn't have to obey forign IP rights. Another issue mentioned inthe article is the idea taht China has defence issues to worry about, and the reliance on forgine tech is bad for them. This I belive more than anything else. We, the USA, asked Sony to stop fabricating the Emotion chip in China fabs because it is actually capable of being used in guidance systems for rockets, and capable of being installed in parrallel to form supper computers. So China needs its own processor technologies, and they need to coem true with the notion that they dont' actualyl care about the USA laws, or existing tech in the field of proc fab.

A Cure for the prices of Chinese computers?

[gotr00t]

If you been to China and seen the prices for the computers, they are outrageous by Chinese standards. In the US, we enjoy the luxery of earning an average of 2,500 dollars a month, and a modest computer only costs about 800-1200 dollars. That's very afforadable, since US dollars can buy a lot of things.

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.

RISC vs. CISC

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:Important question: who will fab these chips?

[AtomicBomb]

China actually just enters the big fab building exercise in the last year or so. A few 1
2 8-inch/0.18um production lines will be completed in the near future. It may be part of the reason why they want to fast track their first MCU design.

AFAIK, Russia still lacks behind in consumer electronics. Hong Kong... All my friends in HK motorola, which is the only major HK semiconductor, got sacked. They (the semi dept) just do chip testing in recent years while most of the chips are from a Motorola fab in mainland China.

Re:History of Eastern Dragons

[Afrosheen]

China gets the big beautiful dragons and here in the US all we get are the damn Underpants Gnomes.

I think China got the long end of the stick on this one.

Open Source makes this possible

[erroneus]

If it weren't for the software being made available in source form, this level of adapability would not be possible. If they were forced to use Microsoft, they'd have to create some level of virtual machine in order to run NT or the like.

So let's ponder that open source not only makes the software more available, but also the hardware choice. The source was in front of them. They have all the labor they could want and I'm guessing they pay just as much for the programming expertise as they do for rice field workers (next to nothing). Now we can run anything we like and still get the Linux that the world is just beginning to become comfortable with.

Hardware independance. Software vendor independance. If I didn't know any better, I'd say those were a bunch of damned capitalist pigs taking advantage of the free labor of others to their own advantage. (Did they release the source code of their changes?)

Congratulations to the Chinese -- they aren't the enemy that the Soviets were and the women are hotter too.

Re:not a big deal

[mizhi]

There is no way that this chip is completly original anyway. All the know-how on developing it probably came from the U.S. or Europe. All you would need is a few textbooks, datasheets, and a few good engineers for development. With enough time/money any company or government could develop their own CPU.

Because, you know the Chinese or any of those other Asian countries have no originality. Only Westerners are creative.

CPU stats

[carpe_noctem]

Some of the unique things that this CPU will feature are:
* Automatically reallocates all system devices to have equal priority, bringing your system to a slow crawl.
* Chip will spend all of its spare cycles figuring out how to stop you from using productive applications and networking with other computers.
* Keystroke logging functionality integrated with automatic emailing capabilities to the state police.
* If running linux with sendmail, makes sure that the service runs as an open-relay for spammers

RISC and CISC speed scaling.

[Christopher Thomas]

Well the beauty of RISC is the PII target performance can easily be ramped up to a P4 3G by simple manufacturing upgrades. ...Just like any other chip produced in the past 10 years, or in fact any CISC chip produced within the past 20.

Linewidth scaling makes *any* CPU design faster. CISC was abandoned because it was very hard to pipeline, not because of some magical barrier to linewidth stepping.

Even the pipelining limit is a soft one, because with enough translation stages you can map any CISC set on to a RISC core - which is exactly what every x86 since the Pentium Pro has done.

Sorry if I'm venting, but you were the lucky post that finally made the "uninformed comment" bucket overflow :).

Re:RISC and CISC speed scaling.

[Christopher Thomas]

Don't tell that to the talented and experienced processor design groups at SiByte (now Broadcom) and SGI which had to spend serious effort to get the MIPs architecture to run at 1+ GHz with an appropriate performance scaling to match the clock frequency.

A possible explanation for this is that processors in the past 5 years or so have been scaling their clock speeds faster than linewidth shrinks alone would allow, by adding stages to the pipeline (and reducing the amount of work done at each stage).

For a design that's easily broken down, this works decently enough.

For a design with stages that are already broken down as far as is practical, or for a design (like MIPS) where you have a philosophy of having a relatively short pipeline, you reach a point where you have to do a major redesign before being able to increase the clock speed.

In principle, you might not need to, as the _performance_ you get would be comparable (and maybe higher, as you have less pipelining overhead) [witness the whole Athlon vs. P4 debate]. However, there will always be pathological cases where you're instruction rate is limited by the clock speed, and these cases can actually be pretty common. So, low clock speed will be a bottleneck even if your logic is just as fast as anyone else's.

Linewidth shrinks still speed things up just fine.

The Big Picture

[Jucius Maximus]

"It will become Big Brother On A Chip, worse than Palladium probably."

I believe that this is a very short-sighted and narrow-minded view of what's happenning here. This is not about being able to spy or citizens or having control of citizens' computers. This is about having economic freedom. It's about building an technologically based governmental system and economy built from the ground up in a way which is not regulated by Western governments and corporations. It is similar to the Linux movement and that's why they're getting Linux to run on it.

By building computer systems from the ground up on their own hardware, own chips, own Linux builds with their own applications, they are no longer on the leash represented by terms of service agreements with intel, microsoft, and any other company and have the freedom to do their business their way.

And I greatly admire this sentiment because it represents a 100% swing away from being controlled by anyone and anything.

And don't just think of this in the context of China! The scope of this is much bigger. For example, why do we use Linux? It's because we want to achieve freedom from the requirements, restrictions, fallacies, and roadblocks imposed by using solutions owned by big companies with who knows what code in them. We use Linux because we control it and it represents freedom from the restrictions of some other software maker. China has taken this one step further and has built their own architecture so they can do exactly what they want with no silly restrictions designed to channel money so some exective in a Western office tower. Wouldn't you like to do that?

I give TWO BIG THUMBS UP to China and their initiative in making a non-half-assed attempt to build their system their way. They have the long-term vision to realise that they need true economic freedom from the West to achieve modern-day economic greatness and I admire their initiative. I wish we were all so lucky.

Re:The Big Picture

[xmnemonic]

"For example, why do we use Linux? It's because we want to achieve freedom from the requirements, restrictions, fallacies, and roadblocks imposed by using solutions owned by big companies with who knows what code in them. We use Linux because we control it and it represents freedom from the restrictions of some other software maker."

In rosey hued glasses maybe. I bet most people use it because it's more stable, more secure and less expensive. If it were made by some mega-corporation, but still free as in cost and still a quality OS, I believe almost as many people would still use it. Face it, most Linux users are not those free thinkers who carefully weigh the pros and cons of a tool they use to get a job done based on what philosophies it represents. Sure, most may not admit it, some may characterize themselves as holy crusaders against Microsoft seeking to save civilization, but most, I think, use Linux because it's good. Of course I don't mean to say that no Linux users care about things such as software freedom, but I don't think it'd be accurate to say that that is the reason why all use it.

Flame on...

Impressive

[ionpro]

A reference to an Old English work about a Sweedish hero fighting in Denmark on an American website's story about a Chinese processor.

You've geat mojo.

Whereas all those damned Chinese ever. . .

[kfg]

came up with are gunpowder, clocks, noodles, nearly all of our domesticated livestock, nearly all of our decorative flowers and plants, civil government by competitive examination, cotton, silk, Lacquer, the compass, paper, printing, paper money, kites, riding horeses, the horse collar, the plow, the princple of the helicopter, the wheelbarrow, matches, medicine, . . . etc., etc., etc..

Just who is standing on who's shoulders? Why on earth do you think people bothered the risk of the "Silk Road?"

Not to mention the fact that in modern times Chinese researchers have walked off with genuine Nobel Prizes.

Don't mistake China with China's government of the mere last 50 years or so.

KFG

Re:not a big deal

[Doppler00]

Asian countries have no originality? I didn't say that, in fact a lot of amazing advances in computer technologies originated from Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, etc. We wouldn't have nearly as many computers with the technology at the prices we have now if it wasn't for companies in these countries.

It's just that this Dragon CPU doesn't sound like it is being designed as something competative to be placed on the global market but to be only internally used in China. I would be interested in seeing a datasheet on it when it's available (any links to that?).

Re:Pot, kettle, black.

[be-fan]

Um, the DMCA is a far cry from China. I can sit here and make all the cracks I want about Mr. Bush. I couldn't do that in China. World of difference my friend.

GPL without copyright

[dachshund]

So Microsoft can now use GPL'ed software without adhering to the GPL because IP doesn't exist? You did know that the only thing protecting the GPL is copyright, right? Or were you fooled, like so many other slashbots that copyleft was actually a legal principle completely opposite to copyright? GPL requires copyright to exist otherwise it is a meaningless contract over, as you put it, a non-existent "thing", that cannot be enforced.

From the perspective of free software, losing copyright isn't such a disaster. You couldn't compel people to cough up modified source code anymore (causing the GPL to behave more like BSD), but you'd simultaneously gain the right to freely distribute and/or plagiarize anything you wanted-- including proprietary source code that some disgruntled employee posted to usenet.

One of the fundamental reasons to use the GPL vs. straight public domain is to prevent someone from just making a few changes to your free code, then using copyright law to prevent you from using the new work. This is why the GPL was first invented. In a society without copyright, that's not such a concern.

I'm not saying that a world without copyright would be a perfect place, but I certainly don't think it would be a disaster for projects that currently use the GPL. They'd probably be better for it. While Microsoft might be able to plagiarize a little bit of free code, their business model would basically collapse. Linux, on the other hand, would get along at least as well as BSD does now.

Re:As a matter of fact...

[kmellis]

He was exactly what "we think of engineer", you moron. His undergraduate degree from the Naval Academy was Nuclear Engineering. He did graduate work, but didn't get a graduate degree, in Nuclear Physics at Union College.

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.

There is precedent

[vik]

Buying Chinese chips to remain free is not that stranger than having to buy tickets into space on Russian rockets.

Vik :v)

RMS is not a communist...

[tlambert]

RMS is not a Communist; if he were, he would have written a "Manifesto", like Karl Marx did.

He's also not a luddite; if he were, he would have written a "Manifesto", like Theodore "Ted, The Unibomber" Kazinsky did.

Uh... Oh... Er... Wait...

-- Terry

my concerns

[Artifex]

I'm not worried about any IP rights violations in the beginning, because Intel, AMD, Motorola, TI, or whoever is making similar chips could get Chinese imports blocked from our economy until they get that matter resolved.

Nor am I worried that the Chinese will develop a private version of Linux and not release it under GPL, because as many other posters have pointed out, a private tree would be hard for them to maintain, and would reduce their general compatibility.

What worries me about this is that China isn't exactly known for its pioneering efforts on behalf of minimizing the impact of the technology industry on the environment. I am worried that, in their efforts to introduce this into a world marketplace, they won't follow the minimum environmental requirements that the rest of the industry deals with. I think we should be prepared to ask any company that announces they're looking at using this chip whether they've ensured that those standards will be met, and that we are prepared to hold them accountable for the actions of their suppliers.

I'm all for more chips in the marketplace. I might even buy these if I get in the market and there is an English-language Linux distro (or, better yet, maybe OSX? Wouldn't that be Steve Jobs' best coup, porting that BSD-based OS to it? (Can I say coup when talking about Communist China without being shot?)). But the environmental standards must be followed.

How long until we have extensive trade barriers...

[squarooticus]

...for imports from China?

To benefit workers in industries in which American companies can't compete due to very expensive regulation (minimum wage; workplace environment standards; disability; collective bargaining; parental leave; health care; etc.), some dumbnut president is bound to suggest that we try to keep foreign goods out with tariffs or quotas.

Witness W.'s protective tariffs for steel.

The natural impulse for government will be to protect special interests (in this case, unionized voters) against the evils of the free market, instead of telling them what they don't want to hear: that they should find a new profession, since the one they're in can't make them the amount of money they are used to making without artificially inflating prices for the rest of the public.

I don't know about you, but I am simply not willing to pay more than I absolutely need to in order to get the goods and services I want, just to subsidize the ability of someone to continue working in a job that would be better sent overseas. If the quality of the Chinese-made goods is the same as or similar to the quality of the USA-made goods, and the price is lower, then I'm going to buy Chinese; done and done.

Free trade increases efficiency and, in the long run, will raise standards of living for all people. Pat Buchanan and the Jurassic-era conservatives are living with leftist union shills in a fantasy world of 50's America. Libertarians and the 80's-90's conservatives are the ones who truly understand what makes America great, and it isn't artificial trade barriers. =)

Wrong--it makes spying easier

[MtViewGuy]

I don't think you realize what the Chinese are trying to do.

By developing their own CPU and operating system through official government sanction, it gives the government a way to effectively spy on Internet users because the government knows how everything works and will very likely use this knowledge to attempt such control. You are forgetting that mainland China is still in many ways an authoritarian state and the government is more than willing to spy on its own people to stamp out enemies of the state such as the Fulan Gong movement.

Does the book 1984 have any meaning to you? Mainland China is headed in that direction if government control of hardware and software technology has its way.

some people are not polite

[Erris]

...instead of using paranoid legal force like the GPL, the BSD projects politely encourage code sharing.

This is all fine and good until some big fat corp takes that code, decides they own it or key modifications and blocks you out. China is just another big fat corp, except they get to make their own laws.

We shall see if China's lip service to information freedom is real. It's hard to imagine a country that openly practices censorship as commited to any kind of freedom. Chineese companies are infamous for patent infrigement, so all this railing against the "intelectual property trap" looks like a practical measure based on fear of trade reprisals. Looks and sounds like "Yankee inginuity" of a century ago, when the US ignored European patents. The US kept it up until it had enough "intelectual property" of its own.

The original question was if the US would lean on China for GPL violations. The answer, given the history above, is NO. Nor will they bother to enforce BSD. The US will only bother to limit imports if sufficient loss of royalty income is seen. Software that comes "for free" with a widget? Forget about it. That's going to include computers like the Dragon Whatnot.

Re:Public opinion on Taiwan

[Kaiwen]

Having taken lots of trips to Taiwan, I've noticed that pro-China sentiment (especially among young people) has increased considerably in the last two years (particularly in the last year).

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

Re:Sparc?

[nedron]

I thought the same thing. The SPARC architecture is a published open standard and the royalty free license can be purchased by anyone for (US)$99. The tech specs are available for free from their website, and the SPARC instruction set is published as IEEE Standard 1754-1994.

If someone wanted to manufacture their own CPU, this makes it pretty easy. SPARC V9 is the 64-bit version.