Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

10 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  2. 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/
    1. Re:China's Chip by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, MIPS asm _is_ an open standard and they were careful to not use the few instructions that were covered by patents.

  3. 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.

  4. Re:Welcome to the future... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  5. Re:The beginning by Visaris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  6. Reason for MIPS r0 by yerricde · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?
  7. 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 :-)

  8. Sounds like a winner.. by digital+photo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  9. Yeah, but can you build a... by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 5, Funny
    ... Beowurf cruster out of them?

    Oh, my goodness. I'm so sorry!

    --
    --- Ban humanity.