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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.

3 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. 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/
  2. 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.

  3. 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 :-)