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China's 64bit Homegrown CPU
An anonymous reader writes: "EE Times is reporting on China's BLX IC Design Corp nearing the completion of their first 64-bit CPU. Based on the MIPS instruction set the 500-MHz Godson-2 microprocessor is aimed toward distributed grid computing. To avoid MIPS patent issues, several instructions (unaligned loads and storeds in the 32 bit version) have not been implemented but with the support of over 60 software providers such as Red Flag Linux and the ability to tweak compilers to not use these instructions this should not be a problem. The Godson-1 processor (also patent free) was announced last year and was aimed at the embedded market." The Godson processor line has generally been called Dragon by the Western press.
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Copy pasted for you, my friend at Slashdot :D
BEIJING -- Stay tuned: China's first homegrown CPU is about to go 64-bit.
One of the country's most promising start-ups, BLX IC Design Corp., Ltd., told EE Times Wednesday (March 5) that it is closing in on a 500-MHz microprocessor that it will market toward China's leading server vendors, including Legend Group and Dawning Technology. It would eventually be positioned as the engine of a distributed grid computing network that will be used by public and private firms here.
The chip is dubbed Godson-2 and is the follow-on to a 32-bit, 266-MHz version released last year that is aimed at the embedded systems market. Both chips are largely based on the MIPS instruction set, but are not fully compatible because they avoid the use of key instructions that would run afoul of MIPS patents.
BLX has moved quickly to rally Chinese industry support around the architecture, launching an alliance that intends to attract 100 members and create 100 designs within two years. "We already have 60 companies and 15 designs so we are ahead of schedule," said David Shen, chief executive of BLX. "We have started working with Haier, which is the biggest consumer manufacturer in China, and they need a lot of chips."
All of the 60 companies that have joined are Chinese firms, Shen said, and they range from upstream hardware makers, to consumer giants like Haier, and software providers Red Flag Linux and Great Wall Software Co.
Godson-2, which has also been translated into English as Dragon or Longxin, has already been prototyped. Samples are expected to roll in the first half of next year. The chip will be binary backward compatible to the 32-bit Godson-1, a path of compatibility first chosen by Advanced Micro Devices in development of its Opteron line.
Some of the improvements over Godson-1 include a four-issue super-scaler architecture, dynamic branch prediction and a non-blocking cache design to allow for multiple misses in the memory array. The chip will probably be made on a 0.18-micron process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., although Shanghai's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. is also being considered.
Planning for Godson-3
Even though Godson-2 hasn't been officially rolled out, researchers at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a government research group that first designed the Godson architecture before licensing it to BLX, are already thinking about a Godson-3. The core design will be similar. But more features should improve its standing.
"By the end of next year, we hope we can add in multiprocessor support and on-chip secondary cache. If these features are added, the power consumption may be around 10 watts," said Tang Zhimin, a senior ICT engineer who headed up the Godson project. The power budget for Godson-2 is around 5 watts, based on a 1.8V core and 3.3V I/O.
Also under consideration are SIMD for multimedia processing and multithreading support. "We are also looking at how to integrate multithreading with our current superscalar architecture," Tang said.
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
To all you genius programmers: you're good. But are you good enough to outhack half a dozen Chinese guys working for half your salary?
I predict that within 10 years, half the US programming market will have gone to these overseas firms.
Been there, done that.
Ed Yourdon's "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer"
and the sequel
Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer
Right here.
I predict that within 10 years, the living expenses of an average Chinese guy will have doubled, as well as his salary expectations. Ditto about ours... :/
They compile it like a MIPS CPU, and just workaround the handful of opcodes that are missing.
This isnt so much a 'new' CPU as it is a chinese clone of a fairly old one.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Thats no wonder - it was refined during years of research by Henessey and Patterson.
However if you look close you will notice that the instruction set does also contain some obselete legacy. For example branch delay slots do not make any sense with OOO Architectures. It is also questionable whether wasting quite a bit of instruction space for integer arithmetic both with and without overflow trapping is worth it. Maybe the could just have used the extra space for a proper move instruction so R0 is freed.
I did post the story but the last sentence which was cut was very important.(Original).
"Although there are no patent issues MIPS have been known to be very aggressive toward people who try to create compatible systems."
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/05/202320 0&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=103
Hmmm......
Maybe the could just have used the extra space for a proper move instruction so R0 is freed.
The MIPS architecture already has a proper 'move' instruction without using r0: r12 = r8 | r8, or r12 = r8 | 0 (zero specified as immediate). The r0 is frozen at 0 so you can do negations (for which ARM uses 'rsb' or reverse subtraction) and other things where zero must be the first argument.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, MIPS asm _is_ an open standard and they were careful to not use the few instructions that were covered by patents.
DRM only adds functionality like controlling what recipients are to allow to do with emails - just disable any functionality to forward emails which contain confidential data. Don't want others to use your picture for other purposes than viewing it on your website? Possible. Lost your Palm with those rather private pictures on it? No problem. And ofcourse digital media will no longer be copyable directly... but digital media will become a lot cheaper sometime in the future - the price is mainly due to the expensive technology used to create them; expensive studios, 3D-software, special-fx-software, videocamera's etc. are expensive but get cheaper and cheaper. This will not only drive the price of the media down (which will definately raise the volume) but bring a lot more on the market since it'll become a lot cheaper to make things for everyone. Especially with bandwith getting cheaper.
Now the things that you DO have to fear:
And then offcourse one can still record the analog output of the tv, monitor or speakers but for many applications it'd be really usefull, however.
0x or or snor perron?!
From the sound of it, the Godson chips will be lower powered in terms of performance to current US chips. However, I find the energy consumption to be very attractive. Ie, 5 watts and 10 watts for 266Mhz 500 Mhz respectively. Scaling up linearly, that's still just 20 watts of power consumption for a 2Ghz chip.
But what I'm thinking is that China is aiming for is low cost and low power consumption chips. Ie, can be used in portable hardware and/or massively parallel setups.
Granted, they can't SMP the chips in hardware, but with a Linux cluster of these, they could quite readily setup a powerful computing cluster.
Personally, I'm glad that they are designing their own chips. It would be nice to see more competition outside of just the big two.
The way I see it, if they produce these chips at low prices($15-$50), at such low power consumption levels, I could easily see myself building many small nodes of them. Maybe now, I can POVray just ever so faster... :)
Winged Power Photography
Try this article. Since I can't really read simplified Chinese I am having a hard time reading through it. -_-|||
FYI 500Mhz/64bit/1mb cache is fairly close to the top end of what you can buy from everyone's favorite MIPS-based vendor, SGI. I think the top end from SGI is an R14000(A?) at 700Mhz with (1?2?)Mb of cache. [Yeah, you can tell I keep real on top of the cpus in machines that cost more than my annual salary in most cases. ;)] c.f. the Fuel line of workstations.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Unaligned loads doesn't make a difference when it comes to performance - if anything it makes the chip harder to make and verify.
:)
The fun thing is; MIPS PROBABLY pays compiler companies to include unaligned loads in the generated code, thus making sure that MIPS-like processors won't work (why else would those instructions be present in places where there is no apparent reason for them to be).
MIPS feels that they have patent for those instruction in both hardware AND software (never enforced, litigation always ends with a settlement).
Anyway. Those instructions could be taken out and both Linux and windows CE would perform as well as now.
Performance would be a theoritical 2 BIPS if memory system can keep up and prediction and caches never miss.
But things doesn't work that way
Not a very communist name though.
Well, the "communist system with chinese elements" may be closer to good old facism, but I doubt they'd use feudal terms to name products, esp. if they're going to have exposure abroad.
Or have I missed a change in trademark trends?
Chinese culture extends far beyond Communism. Communism did a good job in destroying a fair amount of Chinese culture, but it never came close to giving it the ole KO, nor has any other ruling class. The Mongols or the the communists, you name it... when you're contending with that many people, even if you're the ruling class, you just end up getting diluted in the population.
This said, heaven ("tian") is used all over the place in China, as are plenty of other Taoist, Confucist and Buddhist terms.
And China is pretty much "communist" in name only, anymore. It's still run with an iron fist by a small group of men, but if you've not been there, I encourage you to visit. You'll see capitalism one helluva lot more than you will redistribution of wealth.
1. First, you obviously know nothing about the Chinese marketplace.
2. They are cracking down on it. When I was in Beijing, I passed a billboard several times that had posted, in BIG letters, something like "BETTER FOLLOW NEW COPYRIGHT PROPERTY LAWS". Wish I'd had a camera at the time(s).
While pretty funny, in an outsider-looking-in sorta way, it's just more evidence of what they're doing to try and limit piracy and IP theft.
Based on the traditional chinese culture, it is considered to be easier to bring up a little baby, when it is tittle, that parents give there child a "Ugly" nickname. So ,in Chinese, 'Gou Sheng'(means a kid is brought up by puppy's leftover) is normally used, especially in countryside, which pronunciation in chinese(just like the pronunciation of Goshen ) is just like Godson, which meaning is so good in English.
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s ht m
In China, it is normally called as Long Xin, which didn't mean Dragon Hear. As some of you guys know, Long in Chinese means Dragon and Xin means heart. But there is another meanings of Long and Xin, Long reffers to All Chinese People and Xin means chip. So longxin means Chinese Chip!
If you guys want to know the story of developing the chip and if you understand Chinese , you can navigate to the following URLs£
http://www.pconline.com.cn/news/hotpick/hy/1021
http://www.csdn.net/Develop/article/15%5C15461.