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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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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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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.
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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
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?
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.
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 :-)
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... :)
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Oh, my goodness. I'm so sorry!
--- Ban humanity.
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.