China Forges Ahead With 'Dragon' CPU

Dynamic Drive writes "There's an interesting article on Cnet regarding China's eager attempts to lessen her dependence on foreign technology when it comes to CPUs. The latest endeavor is a homegrown chip named 'Dragon', which apparently is roughly equivalent in speeds to those of Intel chips made between 1995-1997, or 200-260MHz. While I think such an audacious effort is most certainly commendable, I can't help but wonder what the potential things that could go wrong with designing a CPU are, such as software incompatibilities etc." This is the same processor mentioned in September, only now more than 10,000 of the chips have been made.

Comments

Some clarifications...

[francium de neobie]

It seems that most of the Slashdot population are misinformed about the Godson-I chip...

1. Although the chip's Chinese name can be translated directly to "Dragon chip", it has an English name "Godson-I"

2. The chip is manufactured in .18um process. Not the old .25um.

3. The chip is targetted at the embedded market, it's not going to compete with the current GHz chips like Pentium 4 or Athlon XP. It's not guaranteed for the future Godson generations tho...

4. Therefore, the chip has an extremely low power consumption, ranging from 0.4W to 1W. (Compare: AXP and P4s -- 50W - 80W). Yes - you can theoretically run 100 or more Godsons simutaneously and they're just consuming the same power as ONE 3GHz P4.

5. It's an MIPS chip, not X86.

If you're able to read Chinese, check out the following URL, it gives you a much clearer idea about the chip

http://www.blxcpu.com/

and,
Merry X'mas :)