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China's 64bit Homegrown CPU

Posted by michael on from the enter-the-dragon dept.

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.

25 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. Homecloned, you mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Taking an existing instruction set and removing stuff from it isn't exactly creative...

  2. US or online vendors? by intermodal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wouldnt mind playing around with some of these. Also: how is availability here or in china for related hardware and motherboards?

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    In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
    1. Re:US or online vendors? by ShadowDrake · · Score: 2, Interesting

      My thoughts exactly. Sounds like it could be a viable C3 competitor-- cheap and cool-running, and Linux-friendly, with the added benefit of being able to slap "64-bit" on the label.

      I'll try any architecture once....

      --
      It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
    2. Re:US or online vendors? by intermodal · · Score: 2, Interesting

      plus its got the cache to be worthwhile. I find myself presently switching to a dual Pentium Pro because the my 900 MHz Duron has such a small cache that compiling is too bloody slow. These as it said in the article have 1MB of cache. Let's see someone else match that on an inexpensive chip.

      --
      In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
  3. DRM? by supabeast! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hopefully the Chinese will leave DRM out of their chips and give people looking for a "free" CPU a competitive option to the crippled intel/AMD CPUs.

    1. Re:DRM? by stratjakt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      >> They will be when DRM becomes mandatory.

      I get tired of hearing that phrase. Do you really think the government is going to mandate TCPA technology? Yeah I know some crackpot sponsored a bill, but it was long since blown out of the water.

      That is, however, something that's very likely in China.

      As for Intel/AMD/VIA/Transmeta/IBM/Motorola, you think they'll all conspire together against you to make sure you use TCPA? They're competitors. If Intel made TCPA platforms that couldnt be disabled, AMD would pick up 100% of the market that doesnt want it.

      It just doesnt make any sense why people are so eager trust the Chinese govermnent as if they're some kind of savior for freedom of thought. I'd be very wary of what the Red Chinese would like to force into everyones desktop box.

      --
      I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
    2. Re:DRM? by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 2, Interesting

      To think that they could go from copying a 500mhz chip to producing chips that can keep up with 3ghz x86 chips (and this is assuming that the x86 market stands still for a few years) seems to me a bit of a stretch.

      Funny, I recall almost precisely the same thing being said about Japanese dram production, round about the time of 16K (that's bits) drams.

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
  4. China's Chip by hhawk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think this shows 3 points

    1) Free and easily ported OS allows them to have a reasonable non-standard processors.

    2) US restrictions on exporting high powered chips and other computer parts are easily diluted by open standards.

    3) Test, over time, in the market place the use of cheap open chips vs. more expensive perhaps more cutting edge chips (from the west). Do you use 1 or 2 AMD or Intel chips costing 700 USD or 5 or 6 Dragon/Godson 2 chips costing? $5 or $50 (etc).

    Re #3, an engineer can tell you which is "best" but only the market can pick the real winner.

    --
    http://www.hawknest.com/
  5. Welcome to the future... by asparagus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you're one a million, there's a thousand people just like you in China.

    Even though massive portions of the Chinese population are poor farmers, the contingent that has adopted the Internet is (as a result of being a smaller portion of a larger population) far beyond their US counterparts.

    The Internet allows for capitalism on global scale to be much easier. Up until now, the US has maintained the lead by appropriating the smartest people from other countries (H1-B's, etc.).

    However, we're about to see the trailing edge of this trend, where the smart kids stay at home. Already, one of the top 4 software development groups is based in India.

    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.

    Anybody have any current data on this trend?

    -Brett

    1. Re:Welcome to the future... by vlad_petric · · Score: 3, Interesting
      The United States have been preaching "economical openness" for more than 2 decades now I think. "Do you want US aid? Open your economy ...". Quite a few times this worked against the country implementing the measure, but most of the times it worked well for the US (as its very competitive merchandise flooded those markets). There are some areas in which openness works against the US - like CS jobs.

      I believe that more and more jobs will be exported to India, but probably not China, because of the language barrier.

      Now I'm all for openness myself - I just believe that it *has* to be applied both ways.

      --

      The Raven

    2. Re:Welcome to the future... by Cyno · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I sure hope you're right. Er, well, no I don't. I wouldn't mind the US maintaining its economic superiority over the rest of the world, but honestly I just don't trust most Americans or Capitalists to do what is right whenever the choice involves money. So although the alternative may be chaos for a few years, perhaps even decades, I'm more willing to give it a try than accept the word of these old politicians and CEOs who can't even think creatively enough to make use of all the technology developed in the last two years. I can only imagine how draconian our laws will get when tomorrow's technology becomes available to the public.

      Wireless networks have almost all ISPs and media companies extremely confused. They just don't know what to do with it or how. Its not their fault, they're just old an obsolete. I say it is time for them to be replaced by new groups of communists and teams and people working together to learn and teach and solve problems without a heirarchy, without a class system.

      Maybe something good for a change, instead of business as usual. Because there's just no love in capitalism. AOL will NEVER, AT&T will NEVER, SBC will NEVER provide broadband up and down until it is forced to by its competition, Free Software, Open Source, Communism, good people that want to share, whatever you want to call it.

    3. Re:Welcome to the future... by cduffy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Being that the going rate for Chinese contract coders is between $10-20 and my take-home pay is $13/hr (plus a *lot* of stock), I think the chance of getting half a dozen of them to work for half my salary is pretty damn low -- and would be even at my old, pre-bust ($35/hr) pay rate.

      IIRC, Russian contractors are somewhat more expensive -- $20-30/hr -- and Indian contractors even more expensive than that, in the range of $30-40/hr, but with less of a reputation for leaking code.

      (My out-of-state short-term contract rates -- $70/hr -- may be forced to change, but since those mostly come in to play when someone calls me in to help maintain software I wrote previously, I doubt it).

  6. Nice power consumtion... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    According to the article it's only a 5W with an old 0.18um process.

    Godson-3 with SMP support and on-die cache will use only 10W while Intel Itanium2 uses 130W.

  7. DSP Chip announced yesterday by bstadil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't forget the DSP chip announced Yesterday. This is really bad news for TI, as the chinese market for cell phones is growing much faster than US and almost saturated Europe.

    --
    Help fight continental drift.
  8. Is China the next Japan? by MongooseCN · · Score: 4, Interesting

    People used to hate products like electronics that came out of Japan. They used to be considered cheap crappy imitations. Now Japan is one of the most respected countries producing electronics, if not the best.

    So may China be next? China has a reputation for developing cheap goods and electronic equipment, but they seem to be getting better and better. Maybe someday soon they will be producing electronics as good, if not better, than any other country. The added benefit is that China doesn't follow all the same patent and copyright issues as other countries so they are truly free to innovate and compete. This coupled with Chinas new more positive view on Captitalism and China could become the new super power.

    --


    Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
  9. Are they available for general use? by mcgroarty · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I'd love to find an offbeat processor like this on a board which still accepted standard PCI cards, or at least a few USB peripherals.

    Does anyone know if this, or another like it, will ever be available stateside with an ATX-mountable motherboard?

  10. yeah nice but performance ? by johnjones · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder how well it actually performs

    MHz is not everything I wonder how much of a performance penalty e.g. not having unaligned loads actually is and compared to a true MIPS core what the penalty

    anyone got basic benchmarks ?

    regards

    John Jones

  11. Bye, Bye Tech Industry by duffbeer703 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The only difference between the tech market and clothing, shoes, steel, rail and other industries is the day the pink slips went out and the doors shuttered.

    --
    Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
  12. Wait a minute.. by ACK!! · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They use linux right...

    How hard is it to create a new version of linux for a new CPU like this?

    I am no kernel hacker but doesn't there have to be certain hooks for the CPU included for a port to be successful?

    How do they get an OS (linux or whatever really) running on this thing?

    --
    ACK /ak/ interj. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. i
    1. Re:Wait a minute.. by taniwha · · Score: 5, Interesting
      You can do a simple (non-optimised) kernel port to a fresh (but well behaved) CPU in 1-2 weeks if you know what you are doing and you already have a GCC port available - a production port is probably more like 6-months or more.

      Actually porting GLIBC is a lot more work than the kernel.

      Porting a kernel while debugging a new compiler for a new CPU architecture is a LOT more work than doing either (I know this from sad experience :-)

  13. Chinese article? by saihung · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does anyone have a link to the announcement in Chinese, or to the Chinese company's site? I'm especially curious to see how they got the name "Godson", since there's no simple Chinese translation for the word "god". If the Chinese term is tian1zi3, which is suspect it is, then it really means "Son of Heaven", another term for the emperor.

  14. Bad news for Intel and AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Soon Intel and AMD will be like Ford and GM. With cheap labor, China can easily kill Intel and AMD. They just need time and money to do it.

  15. Say what? by MasTRE · · Score: 1, Interesting

    To avoid MIPS patent issues, several instructions ...

    Since when do the commies give a flying about patents and other such things? And I don't suspect any of their clients would either. So why waste your time on making it patent-free?

    --
    Must-not-watch TV!
  16. With SPARC they wouldn't have any patent issue... by maitas · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, SPARC would have been a far better option, since it's a 100% open spec paltform. The license cost just $99!!! Amazing..

  17. Leapfrog in technology? by nemeosis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This chip might be an interesting move. We have seen leap frogs in technology adoption in developing countries.

    Examples:
    1. US homes are still mostly connected via copper phone lines. Developing countries which are barely starting to lay out their communications network infrastructure are laying out fiber optic lines. Whether this is good or not is still yet to be seen. Fabric switches are still incredibly expensive.

    2. Cell phone technologies in Japan, Korea, and other asian countries are connected via newer and more advanced 3G CDMA digital technology. For some countries, its much cheaper to build a wireless infrastructure than it is to lay out ground cables. China is pushing their own CDMA technology.

    So, with this new 64-bit CPU, maybe China will make the leapfrog into 64-bit computing. They will have a Linux system capabable of handling a 64-bit instruction set. Assuming of course, that Microsoft doesn't shutter some kind of shady deal with the Chinese government, to have them all running their servers on Windows 2000/.Net operating systems. The company making the chip will have to speed up the CPU though, but maybe they can follow Moore's Law and double every 18 months.

    Who knows, maybe this will cause a revolution in China. The population will be running their systems on a more advanced 64-bit Linux system running MIPS-like instruction set. Then again.. maybe not? The market will decide.