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."

Comments

Re:namespace collision

[Gareman]

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

Yeah but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

But wouldn't you say its a good start?

[gotr00t]

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.

Re:Sure i'll buy one

[Bendy Chief]

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.

Re:namespace collision

[mcdrewski42]

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.

Nice SoC design

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

EETimes article

[morcheeba]

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.

Re:Sure i'll buy one

[Frymaster]

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.

Re:Sure i'll buy one

[Troed]

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.