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Chinese "Dragon" Chip On Sale

mrseigen writes "The processor that Chinese firms have been working on as a response to foreign equipment and software is now available for pre-order. The Inquirer did an article here, and the company website is here. The chip will supposedly ship with Midori Linux."

19 of 554 comments (clear)

  1. Re:namespace collision by Gareman · · Score: 5, Informative
    Midori is Japanese for "green", by the way. Nothing particularly special about the name.

    Try:

    Akai: Red Kuroi: Black Aoi: Blue Shiroi: White Murasaki: Purple

  2. Yeah but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The only problem is that these "dragon chips" are about equivilent to your average pentium 2, they can't hold a candle to anything coming out of the united states. This chip may work for webstation-type things, but it will be useless for any real computing.

  3. Re:Midori -- Stale Distro? by Rational+Nerd · · Score: 2, Informative

    The way I read the article they are using the Midori distro because of the support for written Chinese (not specific on the dialect).

  4. But wouldn't you say its a good start? by gotr00t · · Score: 3, Informative
    Also remember that there is more riding on the sucess of this chip than its speed. China is trying to decrease its reliance on foreign technologies, and has been all along, which explains the huge amounts of revenue that have gone into the research for a better fighter plane when they could have purchased some Soviet MiGs all along.

    This nation has never before manufactured a computer processor of this power before, and even though processors from the US could easily beat it, its still a good bargain for the users and a good start for the country. Moreover, not everybody is a gamer, and sometimes, older processors do fine for everyday work tasks. For example, I have seen a lot of server boxes that still use Pentium II class processors and work fine. I still sometimes use my P II desktop, which uses SuSE Linux 7.3, and I think that its just about as fast as my Athlon 1700 when it comes to word processing and simple GUI tasks.

  5. Re:Sure i'll buy one by Bendy+Chief · · Score: 3, Informative
    Free Tibet

    In this context, your post is a little funny, but the flagrant abuses of Tibet that China has perpetrated since the 1950s are inexcusable. The fact that China is even allowed NEAR the United Nations is a gross mockery of justice.

    I know I'm evangelizing here, but people need to know that one of North America's big trading partners uses techniques every bit as brutal and inhuman as Saddam Hussein's.

  6. Re:namespace collision by mcdrewski42 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The TM can be for the logo, symbol, wording etc.

    In this case I would assume that they could not claim rights to the word (as posted above it's the Japanese word for Green), but to the presentation/logo of the word/mark.

    For example, if you check out one of Australia's largest banks, The Commonwealth Bank you will see that the 'mm' characters are glued together in the word. The word commonwealth can't be copyrighted, but the logo when the 'mm' is glued together like that can.

    --
    /* affect != effect */ void affect(int *thing,int effect) { *thing += effect; }
  7. Nice SoC design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    V-Dragon is an embedded chip, it has an integrated memory controller (supporting 1GB of SDRAM), USB controller, 10/100Mbps Ethernet and PCI controller. Since everything you need is integrated on the CPU, it makes motherboards very simple.

    It won't be very fast, but it should be more than enoug for web-browsing and text-editing.

  8. EETimes article by morcheeba · · Score: 4, Informative

    EETimes has an article on this. They note:

    Culturecom Holdings Ltd., a publisher of Chinese language "fighting" comics that migrated into information technology in the 1990s, has begun selling its V-Dragon microprocessor for use in Chinese PCs.

    That's almost like vivendi-universal going from a water utility to a multimedia giant! Is there some new business strategy for totally changing industries that I should be aware of?

    They also note:

    The V-Dragon CPU incorporates support for Chinese-language characters, according to the company.

    Wow, I wonder what that means... optimized U16 support? Or is it marketing-speak?

    EEtimes also notes that 300,000 chips have already been sold or have letters of intent to be sold.

    1. Re:EETimes article by Jonavin · · Score: 2, Informative

      Looks like it's got some built-in character generator.

      Able to generate more than 32,000 (extensible to > 50,000)Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters and sizes ranging from 11 x 11 to 127 x 127 pixels
      Capable of generating 3 different kinds of font types (Ming, Black, Round)

      Less processing power is required than for solutions using TrueType fonts

      Less memory is required than for solutions using pre-composed bitmap fonts

  9. Re:Sure i'll buy one by Frymaster · · Score: 5, Informative
    let's get some facts out about tibet and china before anything gets out of hand:
    • tibet was a province of china until 1911. it was a sovereign nation for 39 years before the 1950 invasion by the pla
    • tibet was not, during that time or before a democracy... or even anything remotely like one
    • tibet was, in fact, an oligarchical theocracy before the invasion. over 90% of the population were "landless serfs" which basically means "plantation slave".
    • the reasons for the 1950 invasion by the pla were threefold: 1) to acquire strategic position between pro-western india and china at the height of the cold war 2) to regain the territory of 1911 3) to liberate the 90% of the population from slavery with what was seen as then as a pro-people ideology (maoism) - remember, the chinese revolution itself was very young and idealistic at that time.
    • after the initial invasion, the dali lama was allowed to keep his existing position and control and send a delegation to beijing. this lasted until the dali lama encouraged his followers to rise up against the pla in 1959. dali lama had to have known that this uprising was doomed to failure, massive deaths of tibetans and resulting repercussions.
    • the chinese government has spent an enormous amount of money on the modernization of tibet - roads, schools, industry an airport.
    • one of the primary changes china made to tibet was land reform. peasants in china now are owner/operators of their own farms and not slaves as they were under the theocracy before the invasion
    • reng rong, the general in charge of the tibet occupation was sacked in 1979 for incompetence. he had failed to bring tibet up to the standard beijing had desired.

      no point. just some facts. a refreshing change of pace for slashdot.

  10. Re:Sure i'll buy one by jcr · · Score: 2, Informative

    Is there any truth to the argument that things improved a lot in Tibet when the Chinese took over?

    Depends on what you mean by "improved". They've got more roads, schools, and other infrastructure now, but Tibetans are far more likely to get thrown in jail and deliberately infected with tuberculosis than they were under the Dalai Llama.

    The schools teach reading, math, and science, but the propaganda they pass off as history is rather more blatantly false than you get in most western countries.

    There is also the fact that the roads were built largely by prisoners who had comitted no act that a decent person would consider a crime..

    Better? It's all a matter of how you look at it, isn't it?

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  11. China's Record Bad Enough - Re:Sure i'll buy one by SpikeSpiff · · Score: 2, Informative
    China's human rights record is spectacularly bad, on its own merits. Tibet is small potatoes.

    Tibet is pretty, and it has many movie stars. So people worry about Tibet.

    30 MILLION people died in China during the "great leap forward" and "cultural revolution" because of politically motivated starvation and executions. That's more than the population of Tibet. In fact, it ranks as one of the great tradgedies of human history, with the black plague, AIDs, WWI, and WWII.

    Tiannenmen. And friends like North Korea, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

    --
    "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
  12. As the poster... by mrseigen · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have to say I made a boo-boo. The article in question actually tells that the processor is available for direct order, not pre-order as I had let on. Not like it stopped anyone who cared.

    (First submission! w00t!)

  13. Re:Sure i'll buy one by Dumbush · · Score: 2, Informative

    You know what's creepy? Check this out:

    Also, you omitted the overriding reason for the invasion of Iraq: Bush needed to divert the attention of his subjects from his incompetence in economic policy, which was killing millions of American through puverty.

    Far better to gloat about how the Iraqis were "liberated" (and gloss over the fact that the subjects of the US imperalism were just as much enslaved as the Iraqis had ever been), than to let people talk about the actual uncertain state of Iraq

    Bush was a very lucky thug. He was not a Great Man,but just a long-winded cuthroat at the right place and the right time to beat everybody's record.

    your left-winger statment is just dumb. No comment

  14. Re:Good news! by shibashaba · · Score: 2, Informative

    Via c3 from taiwan. before that they were doing cyrix even though it was made by ibm.

    --
    ---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
  15. Re:China is enormous by JohnsonWax · · Score: 2, Informative

    IBM deserve credit for making the IBM PC an open standard

    IBM didn't make it an open standard. It was Compaq and others that started shipping clones using a reverse engineered BIOS that opened the door. IBM made the PC credible, that is true, but IBM had no intention of making it open.

    Fact is, nobody with any real measure of marketshare wants things open - since that's paving the avenue for competitors to run them down. Openness is something that the underdogs introduce out of necessity, which Compaq was at the time.

  16. Re:China is enormous by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 2, Informative
    It is true that Compaq (and others) reverse engineered the BIOS in order to avoid paying license fees to IBM. This was made a lot easier by the fact that IBM published the ROM BIOS specification. A good short summary of the original IBM PC Concept is available in the Wikipedia. This states in part:

    The original PC was an IBM attempt to get into the home computer market then dominated by the Apple II.

    Rather than going through the usual IBM design process, which had already failed to design an affordable microcomputer (for example the failed IBM 5100), a special team were assembled to bypass normal company restrictions and get soemthing to market rapidly. The project was given the code name Project Chess.

    The team consisted of just 12 people headed by William Lowe. They succeeded - development of the PC took about a year. To achieve this they first decided to build the machine with "off-the-shelf" parts from a variety of different Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM)s and countries. Previously IBM had developed their own components. Second they decided on an open architecture so that other manufacturers could produce and sell compatible machines - the IBM PC compatibles, so the specification of the ROM BIOS was published. IBM hoped to maintain their position in the market by royalties from licencing the BIOS, and by keeping ahead of the competition.

    Unfortunately for IBM, other manufacturers rapidly reverse engineered the BIOS to produce their own royalty-free versions. (Compaq Computer Corporation manufactured the first cloned IBM PC compatible in 1984)

  17. Re:Dragons /.'d Already by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    But the real kicker with this CPU is the possibility for cheap dual and quad motherboards. If you can get 4 of these running under Linux or NetBSD the performance of one CPU don't mather that much.

    Actually, the problem with SMP is getting the memory bandwidth. If you have 4 processors ready to chew on data, but they can't get any data/program to run from the main system memory, it won't do any good. L1 and L2 caches help, but if they solved the problem, we wouldn't need the main system memory.

    There have been lots of good attempts to solve this problem -- message passing (ala a Beowulf running an MPI application), or some of the NUMA architectures are good at solving particular types of problems. But, none of these techniques will help you run OpenOffice or Quake faster.

  18. Re:Sure i'll buy one by Troed · · Score: 3, Informative

    Having objections to what the occupant nation of Israel is doing is NOT anti-semitic, for two reasons:

    *) Arabs are semites
    *) I have nothing against the jewish people, I do care about what the state of Israel is doing though

    ... until you learn to separate "Opinions on Israel" with "Anti-semitic rantings" I suggest you stay away from any discussions on the matter.