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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.
But they aren't talking about Soviet Russia!! They're talking about Red China!!
Same continent, different form of government!
On a more serious note, though...
Figure's the commie's would have to start at the low end part of the spectrum. No country can totally rely on it's own resources unless they want to move back to the stone age.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Rather than build one from scratch why not simply buy an existing chip manufacturer and start from there?
Dragon ??
Looks like they're copying AMD chips.
Would explain the significance of the name.
Well, I -am- actually amazed at the progression of China's CPU, but I'm even more stunned that Slashdot checked to see if this was already posted...
Here's an October story from the People's Daily (and another from September) to see how they see it...
It's Dragon.
OK, there has to be a chinese site somewhere with details on these chips.
Anyone have a good realtime client side translator for web surfing?
Later in the article...
I have the sneaking suspicion that there are other reasons besides the fact that the chip is homemade that makes people not want to buy it...
"People won't buy the chip just because it's home-made," he told a news conference. "It must be competitive and fit market needs."
He said the chip would soon reside in personal computers, mobile phones and televisions, with a target production of 1 million units in 2003.
What kind of market would buy such an inferior product that I'm sure won't be that much cheaper than chips currently available from Intel and AMD? No, people in China will buy those chips because they will be forced to. Communist Chinese markets will soon be closed to foreign made chips, forcing Chinese citizens to buy these tenth-rate products, just as people in Soviet countries were forced to buy substandard Soviet products (remember the Yugo?).
You would think a country with a billion+ people and vast resources would be able to develop a cpu more on par with current technology ..
All they would need is 1.2GHz to get into Apple territory.
Changes in China, although hapenning at a much slower rate than what western world got used to, are happening, and that's what is important. They know what they're doing and they're doing it the right way. Patience is the mother of wisdom.
China makes a sub-par chip and this is big news? now the shredder moding that was actually usefull!
Speed, performance, instruction set differences, and the stated goal of independence will lead them to avoid Microsoft at all costs.
Maybe this means 'Red Flag Linux', maybe not. But it's a start.
It's more that they need reasons OTHER than it being homemade in order to buy it... as in "Just because it's homemade, doesn't mean people are going to buy it."
Karma: Non-Heinous
Why even go forward with this? By starting at levels of chips FIVE years old, are they going to continue forward in such a way indefinitely? Their products will be running 2002 tech levels in 2007? They'd be better off making some sort of business alliance with a major producer that's much further ahead.
Dude, where's my packet?
It's worth reminding some of those here that the clock speed stated doesn't tell you anything about how powerful this processor is -- it's possible this processor is roughly as powerful as a 500MHz Celeron (for example).
:)
I'd also imagine that this chip will be intended first of all for use in business machines also, where a powerful processor is not as important to the user as it is to the guy who tries to squeeze every last frame per second out of UT2k3.
Bear that in mind before forming an opinion on something that the article doesn't even shed much light on
Besides, if you run more efficent software, 266 is more then enough..
Please no jokes about "640k being enough for anyone". im serious.. most of the time we waste tons of cycles, beacuse we can. one doesnt *need* a ghz chip to get work done..
And if its truely homegrown, and not cloned, then they deserve a LOT of credit for getting this far this fast.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Ok, ok, it's just a lame joke about a lame processor. Move along.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Sounds like the kind of thing you would expect IBM to say about a DEC processor, not from a Slashdot editor. Goodness knows, there's no point in trying something different.
I mean, the next thing you know, we might have things like another OS (Linux, BeOS, QNX, OSX), Desktop (KDE, Gnome), Wordprocessors (AbiWord, OpenOffice)...
Yes, indeed. Better stay away from all that stuff, because choice is confusing, and confusing is bad. Makes people have to use their brains, and all that.
Good thing we have monopolies like Microsoft to keep us poor consumers safe from these upstarts!
Insert funny sig here.
What kind of market would buy such an inferior product that I'm sure won't be that much cheaper than chips currently available from Intel and AMD?
I think you're greatly underestimating how much cheaper this part could be.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What do people need a GHz+ CPU for?
Digital Video?
DTP?
Games?
Databases?
SW Development?
Yes and no. All these things happened before CPUs hit 2 GHz, and my 800 MHz iMac does fine in Final Cut Pro and Photoshop, hell it works great with Virtual PC 6 w/Windows 2000 and AutoCAD 2000.
200-300 MHz will do fine for the vast majority of users. People on dial-up in rural China need a little self-contaned box that hooks up to a TV and plays Video CDs, not a 3 GHz Intel chip that needs a 700 Watt Power Supply.
What could not have succeeded in a free economy, can be forced upon users and developers by an all-controling state.
In other words, if they really decide to do this, China of all nations is very well positioned. They'll probably port Linux to their hardware and have a western-free platform pretty soon.
Are you on drug(s)?!! Why not?
Interesting: a government-sponsored CPU chip.
What if descendants of this chip outperform Intel and AMD CPUs? In theory a large totalitarian government might be able to raise more research funds than a lone corporation such as Intel or AMD.
Maybe in a few years we will all be overclocking our Dragon 8 chips to 33 ghz and complaining about the Chinese chipset drivers.
-- laws are the opinions of politicians --
There will be minimal impact with software incompatibilities. At last count, the 2.4.x linux tree has support for 16 different processors architectures. Windows has support for several processor architectures too (I don't have the exact count to hand). It is the job of the operating system to abstract the processor so that this type of issue does not occur. What can go wrong with this new processor ? Same issues that occur with every complicated design - unexpected/unnacounted for incidents (remember the pentium f00f bug ?)
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
In the spirit of Feng Shui, these chips will always be situated across from the heat sink, have a picture of a fish somewhere on them, and will never do division operations on Tuesdays.
It's still not clear to me what this is supposed to be. Is it intended as a replacement for x86-like CPUs, as most people here seem to assume, or something novel, as the cryptic reference to RISC suggests?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Where can I find a tech brief on this CPU in English?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's the point? While it's a first step to being free from foreign tech, they're equivilant to 200mhz cpus?! Unless all of China will be running Linux sans GNOME/KDE (They could still use one of the smaller, less featrue-intensive X11 GUIS) , BeOS or QNX, China will still require Intel and AMD. Like it or not, Windows is the de facto standard, and a 200mhz CPU won't run the majority of new Windows-based software.
"I can't help but wonder what the potential things that could go wrong with designing a CPU are, such as software incompatibilities etc."
Software Incompatibilities? What?? It's a NEW chip therefore it has a NEW instruction set. There is no question of software incompatibilities since it isn't trying to be compatible with any existing processor. No existing compiled software will run on it.
They're using Red Flag, or whatever the name of their distribution they've been promoting internally is. They don't need to worry about 'chip incompatibilities'.
They just need to write code for that processor, start their own branch of the linux kernal for that arch and off they go.
I think it's commendable not wanting to rely on a foreign country for your main source of technology. It's not like the US has ever used trade embargos in the past....
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
How do you know it's a new chipset? The article as far as I can tell is non-specific on the subject. It could very well be an x86 processor, or in the same family.
I think we'll start seeing all sorts of systems in the 10^2 to 10^3Mhz range over the next year or two. VIA in particular have some interesting products with their fanless C3 processors which operate at 500Mhz - plenty for most applications, and the Eden platform. People will be more interested in smaller systems which are quieter, cheaper, and which use less power. And when you can run things like Linux or Lindows you start seeing things like the Walmart PCs, which I figure is pretty much what they're after. Of course VIA aren't the only ones in this area, although I am more interested in supporting them (and Transmeta) than a certain other chip manufacturer with a virtual monopoly.
I'm amazed on how you can readily classify that chip as inferior... Seen the design of the chip? Guess not, maybe it is the Made in China writing that made you derive this conclusion.
As for closing the market... this comment can only come from a blindly ignorant redneck white trash in a trailer parked somewhere where there is little to no TV or radio signal. FYI, a prerequisite of joining the WTO is to have an open market. China has been a member of the WTO since 11 December 2001.
What kind of market would buy those chips? What about computers that are not meant for managing critical data? And from the article itself, mobile phones and televisions? Why the hell would your mobile phone need a 2GHz Pentium 4?
Get a clue!
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
lets sue them...maybe we can use the DMCA...RIAA...and MPAA to go after them!
This kind of IP thievery has always been a hallmark of east Asian technology.
I don't know what country you live in but I wouldn't make such blanket assumptions. Its not only insulting but it makes you sound very ingnorant.
--china is completely versant in the concepts of "wealth re arranging and managing" -the current accepted western short term profitas modal- as opposed to "wealth creation"-which was the past standard in the eventually named "industrial world". They have thouroughly embraced vertical manufacturing as a means towards rapid wealth creation,are suceeding at it, and their balance of trade surplusses with other nations around the world reflect these principles. This move by them is logical and quite predictable, and I would expect them to gain expertise in this technology much faster than most people might assume. whether from a white room effort or reverse engineering, it won't matter as long as they do it. In 30 years they have gone from basically an almost total agricultural and antique-class manufacturing country to the premier world's mass manufacturing nation, and by even conservative analyst predictions will have the worlds largest "true" economy based on tangible wealth creation by around 2015.
In short, laugh now while you still can. Now I don't LIKE it, I think especially in the US we have made a complete blunder in our trade dealings with china, but I can't dismiss out of hand what they have accomplished in such a short time, nor can I dismiss what the pressure of having a billion and a half people and a need for jobs and energy and fresh water will do to a nation that is lead from the top down as hard as china's is. They intend to kick booty and take names, and in the near future, on the business battlefield and maybe on the real warfare battlefield.
Think about it, the most often heard comment of chinas amazing recent successes is "cheap labor". Nope, that ain't it,for example the african continent has cheap labor avaialable by the millions and millions, but manufacturing is going to china because they are actually able to *accomplish complex tasks in a very large way* using "cheap labor". There's a BIG difference.
I won't even go into how much you saved him in software licenses, you damn dirty pirate! I'm sending the BSA after you. TSK!
Last week, I took an old 200MHz Pentium Pro box that my brother was using, upgraded it to 128MB RAM, and installed W2K Advanced Server. While I wouldn't want to run Autocad or Photoshop on it, word processing and broadband web surfing were more than adequate.
Saved him upwards of $2000.
Not buying a license of W2K advanced server to do web surfing would have saved him over $2000 too.
Back in the 80s Soviet Russia and East Germany (V.E.B. Robotron) both tried to build their own 8 bit microprocessors for their own microcomputers. I heard also about an attempt in what was then Czechoslovakia to build their own microcomputer based on an Z80 clone. In Poland there was the Meritum microcomputer (built in 1983 btw).
These were interesting machines from the point of view of computing history - and I think that today a working specimen of one of those might be of higher value than a working C64. But it was the C64 (and the ZX Spectrum, and the Ataris) that flooded Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany in late 80ies so that even local geeks hardly remember that their own microcomputers ever existed. Why? Well, because computers designed and produced by state run enterprises didn't fit into people's needs, their quality was poor, availability limited to the people - and they were dull as they lacked sound and graphics capabilities.
I think that this example from the past shows that Dragon's fate is doomed from the start. Yes, China benefits from the effect of scale and quality of their chips should be better but ultimately these processors would be used mainly in government systems and installations. And in say twenty years from now a working Dragon will be worth more than a working Pentium-IV.
If 20% of the earth's population decides to make a CPU... they'll do it.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
they used to make "Poisk" ("Search") computers based on chips that were manfucatured in, I beleive, Kiev, Ukraine. The processor was a rip off of the Intel's 8086 chip. Then, I beleive, they managed to rip off 286. We had a bunch of these in our school. They were quite compatible. I've even heard reports of Windows 3.11 almost working on them. Many DOS programs worked just fine (I remember Computer Associates' SuperCalc working quite well). Almost all games failed to work though. I beleive we traced it down to the io port 0x60 not being the keyboard port (I don't know if that's a processor or AT architecture feature).
Unfortunately they never succeeded in making a Soviet verion of the 80386 processor. Now I've heard to stories which claim the reason of the failure. The first one says that in order to reproduce 80286 they just took really thin slices of the Intel's processors and reversed engineered them this way. In order to prevent this, Intel started to print layers of 80386 processor in waves, not on straight planes and it was much harder to slice that without ruining the processor.
The second version says that poplar seeds were to blame: there is a lot of poplars in Kiev (that part is a fact) and when the time for poplar seeds comes, the air in the city is filled with it. They couldn't get it out of their manufacturing areas and had to shut it down.
I passed the Turing test.
The problem with chinese CPUs... ...is that after an hour after you wish ordered another one.
Uhhhhh....The WTO does not define reality. They won't have too much trouble coercing their populace into buying what they want them to buy, despite what a couple of plutocrats in Geneva think of them.
No sovereign nation can take such a risk.
There are lots of reasons why .cn would want to do this. First, being able to build -any- microprocessor means they have to build the infrastructure, which will probably not be just like Intel's. You have to have that infrastructure to be able to build microelectronics in general. Second, they get to miss all the blunders made earlier on that have accreted in modern fabs. Third, don't forget that a lot of H-1 holders are going home, and AMAT for one was full of .cn nationals. .cn will find a ready market by doing what any mercantile entity does - slap nice fat tariffs on imported microelectronics. How they do this is irrelevant, they'll do it.
Kids, microprocessors are not just happy little toys we like to geek with, they are military weapons.
No I don't mean hacking, I mean weapon guidance.
The first SAM interception of an enemy warplane from a USN ship was done with a 64K 1 MhZ fire control director. Ever since, more powerful computer power drives all of our 'smart' weapons. China knows this and is probably not interested in having a CPU ban cripple their firepower.
Building a native capability means that China can make militarized versions without worrying about whether we 'messed up' a production run or can exploit a flaw we built in.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
I have exactly the same rig! gonna o/c it to 233mhz in order to make quake3 and CS more playable :P
Yes. In the Chinese culture the Dragon represents all mighty power and holiness. The ancient emperors were considered true dragons in human form. However, the Chinese dragon is different from the western world's definition. In western world, a dragon is a dinosaur-like creature with a pair of tiny wings. The Chinese dragon is created by combining all the considered best features found in the real animals. The dragon is the Chinese cultural symbol.
I would think...
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
(remember the Yugo?)
:) ) Next time if you wanna go witht "IN SOVIET RUSSIA"[SIC.] Use OUR "national brand" Lada. :) (which apparently came with it's toolkit (since breakdowns were so common).
Dude you really need to get your geography right! We are insulted that you think the great people's Russian workers union and slavedrivers guild would buy such a substandard car like Yugo. Yugo was made in Former republic of Yugoslavia, (now Serbia) and from what i heard it is a fairly resillient car (some guys have had it for over 30 years and other than some rust and a whole boatload of spare parts it is apparently still ticking
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
...in the words of Public Enemy, "Can't Truss It."
Today 233 mHz. Tomorrow...well, 500 mHz or so. But chips are a strategic commodity, and they know they'll be toe-to-toe with the West as they emerge as a bona fide superpower rival. No need rely on the largesse of the US or Japan for microprocessors.
I wonder what they could build a bare-bones PC for, if CPUs were 25-cents or so?
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
cmon, made in china... and the price the cpu should go for, one could easily get an 8 chip system for less than the price of an athelon xp
...but since this is China, well hell, we gotta get pissed that they may might make something better then the standard Linux crap.
Just like Apple kinda flew by all the "I like to shit in this kinda color scheme"
Shit... I have to go... she's sucking my dick... oh shit!!!!!! Tak lter...
by
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Many asian countries refuse to recognise copyright or IP rights in the same way the US did until about '54. Some even have regulations restricting flow of capital to foreign powers (a common way to avoid paying royalties to IP owners that don't keep an office and certain % of their company in the local country) which I think is perfectly responsible practice for nations not wanting to be taken advantage of too much by larger ones...
So I don't really see why they would be any more fazed by the DMCA than the WTO provisions already ignored (or creatively sidestepped) especially when the laws are not even in effect there.
I don't think the basics of x86 are covered by IP restrictions anyway so it's all beside the point really...
It's not that I'm Anti-American - I'm Pro-Freedom
Oh, I get it...Drag on!
Communist Chinese markets will soon be closed to foreign made chips
WTO provisions work strongly against that. With China's production and consumer markets (and 1.n billion consumers) about to join the international markets en masse, demand for processors (both in finished products and as components) will skyrocket. For various political reasons, China probably wants to serve that demand for CPUs internally rather than letting Taiwan or Malaysia do it. Having good native chip-fabs also provides R and D and industrial benefits.
There will likely be some IP-intensive government hardware coming down the pipe within the next five years, which a cool-running, military-hardened (slow but reliable) x86 processor will be useful for, especially one that can be readily adapted to integrate tightly with theembedded software applications of choice. Also, if they space-harden the core as they develop it now, they may gain an edge that way by beating out the P5 and P6-type stuff going up now from europe and the states.
Also, slower isn't necessarily a bad thing in military (or many other mission-critical) applications. An extra three or four nines of reliability is almost always worth a few hundred MHz when lives (and not frags or some database) are at stake.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
I just put together a computer this weekend. It's for my business so it's capabilities won't turn any heads, but it turns out a lot of it was made in China:
Case
motherboard (MSI KT3Ultra2)
video card (Chaintech - nVIDIA type w/32mb)
LCD flat panel monitor (Mag 565)
I'm not pulling out the CDRW to see where it came from - WD HDD is from Malaysia.
My guess is that a lot of the stuff in any computer comes from China. Perhaps the bigger idea behind the Dragon, is to get experience actually manufacturing the CPU. Plainly, China has experience manufacturing everything else.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
... in China, everything can be made for a fraction of the price that it costs American companies. An American IC designer makes $90,000 to $120,000. His or her Chinese counterpart would make $25,000, and that counterpart would live like a king in China. China realizes it can utilize its massive, cheap manpower to wreak economic terrorism on us spoiled Americans.
The PRC could just reverse engineer an existing chip and make more of them. Of course there's that whole copyright issue, but hey, China could simply nationalize Intel's rights to the design. Intel could protest, but it's not like the US is going to do anything about it. I mean is the US is going to stand by while a country oppresses it citizens (Falun Gong, and the Great Firewall, one child policy), invades it's neighbors (Tibet and Hong Kong to some degree), damages our property and holds our citizens hostage (April 2001 surveillance plane), what makes anyone think that the US is going get mad at China over Intel. In any event, after we cowed down to them over the WTO and most favored nation trade status, China should feel embolden to do what ever they want, which is after all what they have always done.
The Chinese people are an intelligent, rational people. Their government on the other hand is not. Any leader that has a need to march giant pictures of him self down the street has no respect for his people, and a very small diao. Any government that is not derived of the people has not legitimacy, that includes the direction that our United Police States of America is going.
Sorry about the rant...
Yeah great, 75% of the people don't have food or access to medication for the growing AIDs epidemic but hell, at least they have Linux computers.
Right... so the biggest society in the world is capable of doing only 1 thing at time?
Like investing in infrastructure, which computing is, isnt a way to help the country???
I really need to talk more to get your comments out of my head.....
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
If I had to design a new CPU, I'd think it be of worth to try and work with asynchronous logic. If the technology for asynchronous CPUs developed far enough, we'd be much better for it.
Of course, realistically in their position I'd never want to try. This is not for academia.
(Post script: IANAEE [electrical engineer]).
---Lailyx
"I've got an ace up my sleeve...I just have to rememeber which pocket I put it in"
Its really hard to type with those little sticks.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I'd like to start out by noting, as I write this, I'm on a 175mhz machine...an SGI O2 to be exact...
For a bit more info, I have a p3-1.3ghz, a dual p2 466, amongst a few others...why then do I use this machine? it's my preference, and I can.
I do everything I need to do in the day on this little 175mhz machine. Why? Because I can. It's non-x86, which for me is a HUGE benefit (such a horrid little architecture...), and is fast enough to run mozilla, X, and whatever apps I need (including Maya for 3d stuff)....
Before you go saying ya it's an SGI, it's not a PC, NEITHER IS THE DRAGON! It's not a standard mobo w/ 200mhz pentium in there, it's a different cpu, different architecture internally, and may be a lot faster than many of you are assuming...
I can't help but wonder what the potential things that could go wrong with designing a CPU are, such as software incompatibilities etc.
If you are a dictator it does not matter. If somebody reports a bug that makes your country's chip look bad, lock'em up!
why would you need bloatware like w2k advanced server to browse the web and process words? .. install linux .. or at least install the least bloated version of windows you can find .. if there is suh a thing.
and cracks open one sleep encrusted eye.
What does it feel like when the whole world changes? Well, how do you feel right now?
The implications of this are simply staggering.
KFG
This kind of IP thievery has always been a hallmark of east Asian technology. At least the Japanese improved on the tech they took. The Chinese can't seem to even beat an 8 year old tech.
Last time I checked, most of the world's motherboards were designed and often fabbed in Taiwan, a democratic "fork" from the Communist mainland. Most likely, there's at least one component of some kind in you're computer that was made in Taiwan.
A search at uspto.gov shows that x86 is not a registered trademark in the U.S. (and I very much doubt that it is in China), and I don't recall Intel using it recently (if ever) in any official capacity. Given that, how exactly is either the name "x86" or "the x86 instruction set" the "intellectual property" of Intel?
To paraphrase from THL/Sexylosers, "Your shit's fucked fuckshit." Feng Shui is most certainly Chinese. How could you attribute a science to a people who can't even pronounce its name?
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
This kind of reminds me of the Agat.
Back in the mid-80's the Soviets cloned the Apple ][, probably as proof of the worthiness of their technology. I'm sure the Chinese are doing a better job. The Agat still had Woz' name burned in the ROM.
With the exit of AMD (in a few years, anyhow) from competing directly with Intel, it's nice to see there may, just may, be some hope for chip competition in the future.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
didn't we just buy more?
Answer that, correctly, and you'll be at least part of the way to understanding China wanting to make its own chips.
Why did Bush the Elder go to Japan to threaten the Japanese government with all being barfed upon if they didn't buy more American cars, even though *Americans* considered the American product inferior?
Answer that and you'll be another part of the way there.
How are you going to feed yourself when you lose you the outside source of income you depend on for your very existence?
Let me ask you this. Why don't we in America simply give up manufacturing everything and simply rely on China to make all our shit for us?
Oh, wait. Nevermind that last one.
Good Lord man. Has the very idea of selfreliance become so foreign to you that you can't even consider its existence, let alone its value, especially to a nation?
KFG
Uhhhhh....The WTO does not define reality.
True... nor is it defined by my opinions or yours for that matter. Reality is how it is perceived by the person making the observation.
Anyway, what is so wrong by coercing the Chinese population to buy their own products? I mean like people drive Chevies, wear Levi's, and smoke Marlboros just to show how proud they are to be Americans and nobody's making any noise about that.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
I cannot believe that some of the people on this weblog are so blinded with happiness by the idea of sticking it to the US that you are driven to mention the words "free" or "libre" with China in the same sentence! China is home to one of the most repressive regimes in the world! You GNU zealots with your communist agenda make me sick.
--sdem
I think you forgot to make the now obligitory Yakov Smirnoff reference; although, in your defense, "In Soviet Russia, "Poisk" ("Search") computers manufacture you " is just not that punchy.
~jeff
They don't want something cheap; they want something that's completely free (as in "libre"). No IP issues, full control of the process, etc.
An IP-free design is more difficult than you suggest. Developing your own circuitry, microcode, etc. does not guarantee you will not step on someone's patent. I would focus on your "control of the process". More likely as their military modernizes they don't want to be dependent on foreign parts, vulnerable to an embargo.
Exactly, a single Dragon CPU may be slow so I'll just pick up a MoBo capable of handling quad processors, I'm sure Linux can handle that.
If it is the only DRM-free chip made then my guess is that most of the Slashdot crew will end up running them.
(n/t)
--sdem
just like they copy software.
I can't imagine how low the price of the whole system would be in China. Can you imagine units (CPU/mobo) sold for 50 euros/$ or so ? I would want to have a few of them. Any chance of any contacts ? Anybody willing to import them ? :)
From the SVCD faq
was decided that DVD - while undoubtedly a good technical specification as
such - is all too tightly controlled by DVD Consortium, a closed body of
foreign companies. The Chinese government did not quite like the idea that the
domestic home electronics industry would have to pay royalties to foreign
companies in order to manufacture next generation video disc products for
Chinese people. It was calculated that creating a royalty-free, full-fledged
video disc format on their own would be a major long-term win for the domestic
industry. Moreover, this was also considered an issue of national pride; an
opportunity to flex some technical muscle, and to send a clear signal to the
outside world that China has enough critical mass to be able to ignore foreign
entertainment standards it does not want to conform to. (Chinese politicians
and researchers are now keen to celebrate SVCD as the first international
high-tech standard that has been developed in China.) Finally, it was also
thought that a Chinese video disc standard would help in pressuring the DVD
Consortium to keep the licensing fees down, at least for the Chinese market.
"I can't help but wonder what the potential things that could go wrong with designing a CPU are, such as software incompatibilities etc."
The Chinese are not interested in running Western binaries or being vulnerable to common Wintel viruses, so if there is a lack of binary compatibility, that's actually a plus. The question is, can they get Red Flag Linux to compile on it, and unless it's a completely dain bramaged design, the answer will certainly be yes.
Given the aggressive intrusiveness of both Microsoft and the U.S. government, not being able to run Windows or Windows software is something the Chinese might actually be aiming for.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I'm amazed on how you can readily classify that chip as inferior... Seen the design of the chip? Guess not, maybe it is the Made in China writing that made you derive this conclusion.
Perhaps it was because the chip is more than an order of magnitude slower than the state of the art.
One word: MECHA
Or more specifically big ass robotic battle mechs bristling with cluster rockets and mini-guns, piloted by pink haired sexy eighteen year old future hentai stars...Hell yeah...Nobody does that better than the Japanese.
It's called the super-continent of Eurasia!
It's ONE landmass for the most part. India is a Sub-Continent.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
The result that came back was interesting - instead of a rating in MHZ and the serial number, I saw, "Help, I'm trapped in a Chinese CPU Factory"
... to be the sole provider of CPU and controller circuitry in Chinese computers. The PRC will be able to build in Palladium-like identification abilities into every citizen's machine.
This effectively:
1. Boosts the Chinese economy by providing (probably "Palladium"-free versions of) CPUs and computers to other countries. Owning both the component design and manufacturing would place enormous pressure on competing economies.
2. Silence dissenting anti-PRC activity by having the widely understood ability to track Internet activity down to any Chinese citizen.
In the future, when Palladium comes integrated in pretty much all Intel and AMD chips, and All your Base Are Belong to Microsoft, The "Dragon" chips might be our only hope of sustaining our freedom. Of course, this is a farfetched cry: Either Palladium or Dragon could go the way of the Dodo before Bill Gates consolidates his empire of Evil.
:)
Funny thing a communist country might help the "Free World" citizens keep their freedom.
I wish them (the Chinese engineers) good luck, just in case Palladium comes to fruition.
if the chip gets adopted because the chip will most likely have its own instruction set. And will Microsoft and commercial Windows apps run on non-x86 chips? No?
That means, if this chip is any sort of success, the community will most like port Linux and their apps over to it. Not too hard once the Gcc compiler is set up for it, and the linux kernel as well.
...because the only real difference between us and China, is that in China, they *know* they live in a police state.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
"While I think such an audacious effort is most certainly commendable,..." Oh for Pete's sake. Here we have a communist government that is the complete antithesis of all things open and free and the fact that they are making a crap processor (and probably making 10 year-old girls work fourteen hour days to produce them (China ) is commendable. Step away from your keyboard and think for a few minutes folks. Making homebrew processors is not ideological. Killing people for disagreeing with you is. What is commendable here? ER
Uh-oh... Criticizing the Chinese government. You're going to get /. on China's list of no-no websites that their populace can't visit. I mean come on, you're going to get a billion people blocked from /. Think before you post, would you?
"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit." --Oscar Wilde
I just put together a computer this weekend. It's for my business so it's capabilities won't turn any heads, but it turns out a lot of it was made in China:
Exactly my thoughts...and let expand the subject a little: Back in the early 80's we (US) sold some of our wafer steppers to Japan.....we laughed at them then thinking they would never be able to build one of these machines. Well guess what, they had the last laugh with more than 90% of the wafer stepper market. How did this happen?: They took our design and improved it and then resold it with japonese camera names. The Japonese kiretsu ( a family of companies) also ensured that the technology would never slip through their hands in a business failure. But business failure is exactly how the US lost this technology and nobody prevented. Today the bulk of those japonese steppers are bought by a company with a liitle "i" stamped on their chips. Late in the 80's we shipped some more late model US made steppers to S. Korea and China and today we are again repeating history by ignoring potential technology growth of those countries. Why do we continue to underestimate the asian capability of knowing a good idea and making it succeed? Southeast asia is designing and improving an economy similiar to the one that Japan made sucessful. . . using some business and technology practices that we first developed in the US (and which we discarded as unworkable). Remember when people thought that China would never be able to design rockets or the atomic bomb? I have seen firsthand how Korean and Chinese can be extremely resouceful and I myself will never underestimate their will to exceed.
"You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- 1976." --George W. Bush, to Queen Elizabeth, Wash
The insulting and the ignorant comment is the idea that ALL East Asian companies are a bunch of thieves. That is implied in your statements as well as the parent commment. You're using a wide brush here pal.
"Do as I say and not as I do" should not be the policy. US companies in the past have done similar things.
Don't get me wrong, I do agree with some of the things said about the infrigment of the IP however, I can't sit and watch people call a whole group of Nations a "bunch of thieves." That to me is racist.
As far as piracy in Taiwan and Hong Kong...lets deal with piracy here in the US...
"Hello, kettle? This is Pot...just called to say you're black!"
Are there people in China that actually pay for Windows?
... food.
Kidding! I'm kidding!!!
C'mon folks, I *LOVE* the Chinese
"And like that
Ehmmm. Read some of the latest Tom Clancy novels and all will become clear. Too bad it's fiction, for the US at least...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
One party choosing one leader=wrong. 2*(one party choosing one leader)=right.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Now imagine that you have to go to some other country and buy their widgets (whatever a widget really is). That country says, sure, you can buy them now - but also has this odd notion that they can stop selling widgets to you whenever they decide they don't like you.
You think you may end up relying on widgets. One choice might be to start making them yourself.
That way you have your own supply of widgets, you don't have to rely on that other country and whatever their current ideas of goodness and niceness are.
You have also observed the widget manufacturing process and are pretty sure that your widgets may start off being a bit less good than those other guys widgets, but you're also pretty sure that as you develop internal markets for your widgets they'll get cheaper and better (a bit of industrial espionage - er, um - research will probably not hurt either).
You will, of course, have to develop your own wadgets to run on your widgets, but you think that that might not be a bad thing at all - reducing foreign expenditures and building an in country wadget industry.
Of course, you might also choose to just buy the other guys widgets. And the wadgets that go along with them. And remain dependent on those other guys.
And you could just buy someone else's widget plant. But widget plants are very expensive. Worse yet, if you buy someone else's plant you won't be growing the local expertise. And probably your widget plant will make the same widgets that those other guys make so everyone will still be buying the same old wadgets. You also notice that the fact that those other guys are using the same wadgets almost requires them all to use the same widgets and you suspect that you can do better.
Your choice.
HAHAHAHA!
ok that was a coupla good ones!
*ahem* There are non-DRM chips that aren't 1/10th the speed of current x86 processors
A few things I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere:
China has a huge population of workers approaching retirement age. They face the same "bubble" problem we do here in the US, where a huge boomer population threatens to bankrupt Social Security as they age. China is attempting to become as rich as it can before the numbers of elders to be cared for expands past the workers' ability to pay for the care of the aged. I believe this is behind much of the economic opening of China. And a chip capacity like this can act like a great wealth-builder for China.
Second, much has been made of the primitive, slow speed of the Dragon CPU. Yeah, it seems (from what we can tell) pretty crappy. But it's a first effort that didn't cost the government too much money. They're not going to throw billions at something untried. They're gonna do a test first, and see if they get this far -- then throw money at it if it's successful.
The chip's speed will increase quickly, and not just because the Chinese will throw money at it. I suspect it's a lot easier to entice a Western-trained Chinese tech grad to return home if you have something concrete to point to -- a working program the grad can join, rather than a pioneering program that might fail.
Will the Chinese exceed what Intel or AMD can do? They may. Or they may continuously play catchup to the Western chip giants. I'm only sure the Chinese won't be a joke for long.
You do not make enlighted posts under the "IN SOVIET RUSSIA" moniker (or any of its variants)!
A level 2 Troll!!! I'm gonna take this and play some AD&D with it!!!! (this is a joke, if you dont understand it, dont bother modding)
If they only buy from us and we never buy from them, we win.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
If Washington were to impose a boycott on China, or export restrictions on certain technology, they would not be able to buy new CPU's. This could harm a rapidly growing economy more than it would harm the military.
Its not really relevant that Washington would probably never do that, what is relevant is that they could. During the cold war, export of advanced technology to communist countries was tightly controlled for example. It has happened before.
It is just like the question why China felt the need to start their own space program when they could have their satelites put in orbit reliably and cheaply by the Russians. They didnt want to completely depend on that, nor did they want the Russians to always exactly know what the Chinese were putting in orbit and for what purpose.
There is probably also the ideological factor. Self sufficiency was always high on the list of ideological priorities for the ruling party. It has been one of the pillars of Maoist ideology no longer to depend on the former western colonial powers (yes, the USA too occupied parts of Chinese cities in the 19th century and used military power to advance business interests, just like the Europeans did). North Korea has taken this to extreme levels for example, it resembles a Theocracy more than a mere communist dictatorship. Ideological, rather than rational motivations are not always entirely logical. This is no different with our own western liberal ideology.
... can't except their own mistakes,
:), but not so far from reality , isn't it ? This is a typical stuborn issue : "You invented the wheel, but I don't like you, so I'm gonna reinvent my own :P"
always have to make new ones !
[Old chinese say !]
No it's a joke
Well, well, when do gonna we learn from history ?
n-e
...but let's hope their chip yields are more compeitive than their rocket launch success rate.
You could make your own, non-pentium compatible architecture and then use Bochs to emulate the pentium and the pentium environment would go faster than the speeds claimed by Dragon.
If you want to see a product where labor is 90% of the cost, go look at a Big Mac.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Dragon eh?
That thing must get really hot...
As for child labor sweatshops, we can be reasonably confident that these chips are NOT going to be manufactured in them. Chip fabs are automated because there is no way manual processing can be done without the kind of human error which would trash entire fab runs at a time.
In any case, the "Communism" you're complaining about is in fact, the kind of pure early 1900s US-style capitalism (management with a callous disregard for working conditions and safety, attempts to organize workers met by government agents kicking down one's door, etc.) I would expect you to be praising.
This was what capitalism was like before child labor laws, OSHA, pure food and drug laws enforced by the FDA, and other things Libertarians consider immoral interference between the contract between businesses and individuals.
Try breaking with /. tradition and actually learn something about public policy issues before exposing your ignorance in public. Read up on the history of the American labor movement sometime.
This isn't to say the Chinese government deserves support, but find out what you're complaining about before you start howling COMMUNISM!
If you want to buy a red, white, and blue Palladium-disabled CPU from AMD or Intel on which Linux might not run, go for it.
Given the direction in which freedom and civil liberties in the US are going post 9/11, how much difference there's going to be by the time Palladium and a Dragon II CPU hit the market between the US and Chinese governments is decidedly open to question.
"People always get the local governments they deserve."
E.E. "Doc" Smith
As to which set of people this will be a grimmer comment about, ask me in 2004 or 2005.
Tech Public Policy stuff
With increasing Linux support for multi-processors, a bunch of these Dragon chips could be quite OK for a wide range of computing needs, if they can be produced cheaply enough. Perhaps the relatively slow speed is compensated by no need for fans or something (I haven't seen the specifications.)
Quest Bird
It only takes 3 or 4 people to design a CPU. So, even with only the designers hes met, china would be able to design this chip. The reason there are so many designers out there, is because there are so many chips to be designed. Most of them don't work on the Pentium/Athlon
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
well, I have a sneaking suspicion you lack basic reading comprehension skills...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Try living here as a 'suspected' al-quada suporter. Any nation where a person can be locked up without a trial, access to a lawyer, or even being charged is not Free. The US is not Free.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
China does have a growing problem with AIDS, but it's nowhere near the level of calamity as it is in the good ole USA.
And 75% of the population is not starving.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"...I can't help but wonder what the potential things that could go wrong with designing a CPU are, such as software incompatibilities etc."
And I cannot help but wonder why a country that is taking a great step like this -- designing their own processors for mainstream use -- would worry about such things as having to rewrite some software.
Seriously now, if they dislike/distrust current chipmakers, what the fuck would they care about interoperating with MS software? And any open source software they need can just be patched for their platform.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
>He said the chip would soon reside in personal computers, mobile phones and televisions, with a target production of 1 million units in 2003.
>The Chinese Academy of Sciences said about 10,000 chips had already been produced this year.
>Technology analysts have said the domestic CPU is supposed to reduce China's dependence on Intel and other chipmakers such as Advanced Micro Devices for both financial and security reasons.
>China wants to install its own chips in sensitive military devices to retain better control, they say.
That's why.
It seems that most of the Slashdot population are misinformed about the Godson-I chip...
.18um process. Not the old .25um.
:)
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
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
Aren't our so called "computer recyclers" shipping our technology waste to China to be "recycled?"
Why not stop burning that motherboard and use it. The Darker Side of Computer Recycling
Yes, but picture a billion people with an abacus each, and we're talking a lot of processing power.
It would insure that China be f**krd up for the next 30 years...
How could you call Feng Shui a science?
The microcontrollers used in embedded systems run at less than 10MHz, for the most part. Fully three orders of magnitude slower than the state of the art. Are they inferior too? No - for the simple reason that they're fast enough for the purpose to which they are put.
"the potential things that could go wrong with designing a CPU are, such as software incompatibilities"
In the free market that would be a valid concern. China is not a free market.
If you have a processor that is incompatible with everyone else you do have to develop your own software to go with it. True. But you also prevent the dependence upon western software. In a place like China they can force that issue.
That helps them keep the west out. In a communist society (yes folks they are communist and yes, that does run counter to the way we live) they view that as a good thing.
When these processors are used in thier defensive and offensive military systems, and THEY WILL BE USED THAT WAY, it will be that much harder for us to counter them. There will be a new niche in the west for geeks who understand the Dragon so that we understand their exact capabilities and combat them.
So software incompatibilities could work for them rather than against.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
From the posts that I've read so far with regards to software compatibility, there's something I see that's been overlooked. Why should China care if the crappy software (Windows, etc.) from the West works with their microprocessor? The whole point of this endeavour seems to be to eliminate their dependance on the West for computer technology.
The whole thing might be good for Open Source software. Even if it's not, it will still be interesting to see what a country with 1/6th the world's population as its potential user base can come up with.
Go China. Stick it to the West.
my guess is that the proc is a copy of something already established. 200mhz is pretty advanced for just initiating a project last year. anyone have any details on the chip archictecture? I'd be curious to see if it's similar to anything out in the west.
if this is truly a "new" chip, I would be afraid, very afraid.... it took us a decade to get to 200mhz.
that kind of learning curve could make them having faster chips in a few years. a billion minds harbors vast possibilities. we have a few select making our chips... a military wide project could advance much faster.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
ME TOO!
Oh yes... I want to play with this too. Can we order a batch from China? I'm not sure what kind of hardware you'd need to go around them, but I'm pretty sure it would be possible to cruft up some PCI glue logic - even using something like one of the SuperIO chips for the IO stuff.
"You could ride a horse to work, but you don't"
-Author Unknown
China wanted to push this homegrown chip to
reduce dependence on foreign chips for their
economy and security (as it states in the
article)
They know very well that their chip doesn't have
the same brute force as today's Athlon or
Pentium chips but it doesn't matter to them.
One of the target niche markets of this chip is
for military use, and they would rather have
hardware they trust for critical applications.
Makes perfect sense to me.
It's worth reading.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
I mean, because of those people telling me that in ten years or so, there won't be any hardware available that supports general-purpose computing.
If anything is going to protect us from Microsoft's hardware DRM mess, it will be chips like these. When Microsoft has strongarmed American companies into producing CPUs that only run signed code, we will have cheap Asian knockoffs to turn to.
Capitalism ROCKS.
Here is the official Dragon Product Brief. The list of software runs on Dragon are:
Basically Dragon is a MIPS instruction set CPU so whatever is availabe for Linux/MIPS probably runs on system based on Dragon as well. Dragon does not have its own instruction set.
Chip design, like compiler design, is one of those things that has a reputation for being much more difficult that it really is, primarily because even among technophiles there's little understanding of what's involved.
Realize that undergraduate students routinely design and simulate RISC CPUs as part of a semester course. Sure, we're not talking state of the art here, but the principles are the same. Get a group of professionals together, and designing a more modern CPU is doable.
Also note that much of the complexity in chips like the x86 comes from:
* having to support 300+ instructions, a large chunk of which are rarely used
* along the same lines, complex oddities like MMX
* support for 16-bit mode
* trying to make a 22+ year old CISC processor with 8 registers be really fast
* more bits of historical wackery, like an 80-bit FPU
and so on. Starting clean, especially if you aren't trying to push the envelope right away, makes things much more approachable.
Feng Shui are two Mandarin Chinese words. Feng ("fung") means wind and Shui ("shway") means water.
I'd buy the first explanation -- yeah, cottonwood (poplar) seeds can make the streets look like a mattress factory exploded, but ordinary house-type windowscreens are sufficient to keep them out, because the fluff is fairly good-sized and tends to stick to itself. -- I grew up in an area loaded with cottonwoods. Best quality shade of any tree, and do well in nearly any climate (they like the desert here just fine!) BTW only the female trees produce fluff. You can propagate male trees by sticking branches in the ground (they root easily) and voila, no fluff.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
So, when all US PC's are crippled with Palladium DRM technology,
us Linux users will be using Chinese CPU's?
Scarey scenario!
www.sjbaker.org
Male trees are the ones that make all the pollen. So, you've got to pick - allergies, or fluff in the yard.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I was wondering when they might start showing up as embedded processors in microwaves and TV, or on cheap motherboards at the computer swap meets..
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
True, tho I've noticed my male cottonwood trees, with no female trees around (in fact none that I know of in this entire valley -- they've all been propagated by planting sticks), make hardly any pollen. You wouldn't think trees would care, but maybe there's some stimulant chemical released by the female trees when they bloom. Dunno, haven't looked into it that far.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Grappling with the pickle jar, Mr. Burns finds himself too weak to open it. Smithers volunteers, but has just as much luck.
Smithers: It's no use, sir. Shall I send out for some Chinese?
Burns: No, those people are all gristle. I want this jar opened!
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Things like aircraft avionics where reliability is prized over speed.
It wouldn't take too many of these to drive a typical fighter aircraft's radar system, for example, and with the Dragon Chip they know that there won't be any nasty nesteggs courtesy of the NSA.
For reference, the Mig-29 upgraded version used to use the equivalent of 486DX33s.
--no cheap labor doesn't make it right, IMO. I am COMPLETELY aganst all this western money and expertise going to china. We were sold a bill of goods that china would "embrace democracy" and "buy our stuff" if we encouraged US and europaen manufacturing to move there. The result has been, well yes, china built up a huge manufacturing base in a short time, and all they buy from us is advanced technology in order to do it even better. They buy advanced machine tooling, the tools used to make more tools to make-everything. And with this chip start, their own complete domestic computers. Lot of giuys been laughing it's "only" a 200, well all I can say is give them a year or two, see how fast they advance. You can do a LOT with not top of the line but still functional computers of these sizes. And with a population of a billion and a half, and with a further market (with cash to spend) in the exploding islamic/oil world of another billion, in a short time they won't need to sell gadgets to the west. they won't need us anymore. We buy walmart trinkets from them, that's it. Next year you are going to see larger home appliances like washing machines coming from them. thgis is a one step at a time deal for them but they are stepping FAST now. They are building their own advanced aircraft, building rockets, and everything possible electronic. I think it's been the biggest economic and political blunder that the US could have made, and there has been zero "quid pro quo", they haven't done one thing about becoming "more free", all they've done is add to their totalitarian population command and control infrastructure, and are building the worlds largest military. At some point they will surpass the US and europe, then they will decide they own the oil. Their demographics and world proven supplies dictate that they need all the oil, and I am convinced they mean to get it. It's coming, and short term profits mentality, combined with western societal indifference, is going to bite us and hard. They turn out engineers by the millions, we turn out team sports players and video game players, generally speaking. They pump out technicians, we create rap stars and people who know how to detail their rides. We are destroying our economy as they are building their's. Something's gonna pop. I am quite doomy and cynical over this situation.
Ouch. And so true.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
You know, im getting kinda sick of this attitude, the "we have it so bad" attitude" you bunch of ungrateful wheps.
Why must you dramatize everything in a chicken little fashion. Im not just picking on you here either, the media is just as bad. I mean we have a "health care crisis, social security crisis, crisis crisis crisis" the media screams. Sure we have problems, (Eg. the patriot act, DMCA, CFR) but sense of proportion would be appreciated. Reasonable people can disagree about what is and is not constitutional.
We elect (we being people, because no matter how much money a company has, it can't punch the chad or fill in the blank) people to represent us, or vote them out of office. We have courts that have protected the constitution, on balance, because judges are human too, they dont get them all right.
I guess it's just easier to stick to simple steriotypes than to engage in legitimate debate.
Sayeth one slashdotter, "We're always on the brink of destruction because it sells. When was the last time you read an article with the title:
'Congratulations! We're still not glowing!'
hell, this could be a great Onion Piece."
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
While I assume (hope!) this was meant as a joke/troll, I'll answer it semi-seriously.
Open Source software is nothing less than an engine of freedom. It's free for everyone; it doesn't work otherwise. That means, yes, that oppressors are free to use it, too. But so are the oppressed -- and they always outnumber the oppressors.
Granted, the oppressed may not have as good hardware. That's a project for the Free Hardware Foundation. But in the aggregate, they have more power, especially when control of their software is in their own hands. Free software helps defeat government censorship and corporate DRM alike.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The original slashdot article said state it: "is based on the RISC structure, a totally another standard. Therefore, it will not fall into the intellectual property right trap."
Besides it wouldn't make sense for them to design a new chip and try to duplicate the bizarre/baroque details of the antiquated CISC x86 instruction set. Better to start with something clean and simple. A new RISC instruction set. And that way they get all the economic benefits of giving a head start for Chinese companies to implement its supporting chips and motherboard rather than having to compete with outside suppliers of existing x86 support chips.
That would be an AT arch thing. no x86 IO port or interrupt is "special". (IRQs go through a programmable interrupt controller (PIC), so some of the IRQ stuff is AT specific, too. Some IRQs are special.)
Most old DOS games eschew the OS and use the BIOS, or even program the hardware directly, for less overhead. Unless things really sucked, it was probably easier to use higher-level functions in programs that didn't need the speed, making compatibility easier with non-games.
As for failing to make a 386, maybe the process size (~size of a transistor) had shrunk too much for them to still make out what was going on. Maybe just the increasing complexity of the wiring and everything, as well as the silicon, was too much to reverse engineer? They would have been able to get hardware manuals that describe how to program it, so they would have known exactly what it was supposed to be doing, which would make reverse engineering much easier than if they hadn't known anything about the CPU. I've never heard of this wavy stuff, and I'm skeptical, but I guess something like it could be true. I doubt Intel modified their process just to make it harder for the Soviets to copy, but if AMD and others had started to try to copy, they might have done something to ward off the capitalists
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
So that they can offer unbelieveably cheap CPUs to China for several years. If it's cheaper to buy them from the west, they will. If their economy is dependant upon the west, they are less likely to start a war.
Black, White, Yellow or Red all people in the world just want to make a little green.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Chapter 1
The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot
of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams?
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