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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.
I wouldnt mind playing around with some of these. Also: how is availability here or in china for related hardware and motherboards?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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.
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64 bits? Maybe now someone will actually be able to calculate how much tea is meant when someone says "..all the tea in China".
Trolling is a art,
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/
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
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.
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.
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
Does anyone know if this, or another like it, will ever be available stateside with an ATX-mountable motherboard?
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
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
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.
I don't think that is anything to worry about. I mean, think about it.
Everyone in America is complaining about how US firms are employing foreign workings instead of US citizens. Once the foreign market starts to keep pace with / pass up the US, there will be an increased demand for IT workers in those countries. As demand for these workers increases, their salries will increase as well. This means US firms will be less eager to hire foreign workers.
Also, I think the US could use a good kick in the pants when it comes to motivation for product innovation. This may be just what we need.
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
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 that is just a nasty rumor to keep all the riff-raff out.
"The only way to catch tiger cubs is to go into the tiger's den."
I'm putting it between the soy milk and the mango lassi.
now we FINALLY know what the next PowerMac will run on. :)
Just raise the taxes on crack.
You don't ignore patent law when you want to eventually sell your products into Europe, America and the rest of the world.
"...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.
...snip...
Godson-2, which has also been translated into English as Dragon or Longxin, has already been prototyped. "
uh... since when is "Longxin" English? no entry in the Dictionary
Actually, SPARC would have been a far better option, since it's a 100% open spec paltform. The license cost just $99!!! Amazing..
umm.... 5 dollars a cpu = HUGE multistacks of little mobos... I said this the first time the dragon was on slashdot.
Please say "Blah Blah, It isn't cost efficient." If you can run a 500mhz Dragon for 5 watts, and an Itanium for 130, why not run 26x500mhz Dragons? or kick it up a notch for 32x500mhz.
Also, if you need something real to look at and you can't understand why this is a good idea, have a look at a PC104 board.
Now Since I've discussed this in the desktop/server cluster end of the spectrum, imagine how this will help portable/wearable/embedded device technology, if their Desktop CPU is planned to run at 5 watts, imagine their portable CPU.
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
Oh, my goodness. I'm so sorry!
--- Ban humanity.
GODSON-2, now 50%* faster at performing miracles than our original GODSON-1 (Jesus) line without the overheating issues associated with the FIRSTANGEL (Lucifer) series.
Note: 50% speed improvement is valid. PhilosopherMark2003 does not take in to account issues that need to be addressed in the new millenium and therefore produces unbalanced results in favor of BhuddaTechnologies's processor line.
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
Am I the only one who gets a laugh out of what the west calls this processor? It's made in Communist China... Communism = bad... USSR... Red Dragon... ahhh forget it.
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.
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.
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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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.