China Forges Ahead With 'Dragon' CPU

Posted by timothy on Monday December 23, 2002 @12:59PM from the not-mythical dept.

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.

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WHy not just buy an existing processor by crimoid · 2002-12-23 13:05 · Score: 1, Redundant

Rather than build one from scratch why not simply buy an existing chip manufacturer and start from there?
Re:266mhz, gotta start somewhere. by Talez · 2002-12-23 21:01 · Score: 0, Redundant

While I'm not doubting your point that 266MHz should be enough for most people, the extra power that a 3.0GHz has under the hood need not be wasted power. There are many interesting things that excess cycles can be used for.

For instance, my 1GHz Athlon is folding for Folding@Home using the Google Toolbar. My CPU usage hasn't gone below 99% since I got the toolbar and every spare cycle has gone to helping humanity.