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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.
It's Dragon.
I'm not so amazed by China's progression. I'm an integrated circuit designer and I can tell you from experience that some of the best designers I've ever met are from the People's Republic of China. Once more of China's IC designers decide to stay in China instead of emigrating to the USA and Canada, we've got Trouble.
Also, once an architecture has been out for a while, there is a lot of information available which can be used to redesign it. Lastly, while 260 MHz was pushing the technology in 1997, it isn't that big a deal in 2002. Does anyone know what feature size the chip is fabbed in?
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
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.
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.
No sovereign nation can take such a risk.
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 ___________________________________
...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.
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"
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
It would insure that China be f**krd up for the next 30 years...