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

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

[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

[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.

dual chip boards

[spineboy]

Will they be called Double Dragons?

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.

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.

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: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?

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.

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 :).

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.

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: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.