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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."
Define "real computing"...you'd be surprised how good these chips would be for embedded use.
Also how much horsepower do you really think you need to for basic email, web, word processing and accounts use? Remember: a lot of people used to run their entire businesses on IBM XTs!
-psy
Many /.ers are blissfully unaware that they can buy $400 "boxen" thanks to Microsoft. That's how much Windows has commoditized the hardware markets. Of course, if Wintel gets into trouble then... no more cheap "boxen" to run Linux or BSD. Everyone will look back at the wonderful days of the "Microsoft tax" if that happens.
Less money may flow in to the US IT industry or North American IT industry.
Adding a new player in to the chip industry means that MORE money as a whole will flow in to the global IT industry. And then there is support and the rest of the follow-ons to the chip fabrication, which will produce new opportunities for revenue for the IT industry, including North America and Europe, if people choose to use the architecture.
The only problem is that these "dragon chips" are about equivilent to your average pentium 2
Confucious say, he who would walk far must still take first step.
Besides, experience with a P2 equivalent is a lot better than nothing when trying to design a P4 killer - not to mention the fact that Linux can quite comfortably be tailored to run on a 500mhz machine - Open Office might be a bit painful, but AbiWord will fly.
Beep beep.
This is actually pretty significant...and kudos to the Chinese for making it happen.
:-)
About the only mainstream chip that I can think of off the top-of-my-head that's not U.S. bred is the ARM (which is British in origin). (I'm sure there are others, but you get my point).
And for all of you who say "this chip has lame performance", think back 5-10 years. If you had something like this 10 years ago, you'd pee your pants. This is like going from 0-100Kmh for the Chinese....many don't have any computing resources....chips like these will start to make things accessible for many (although not all).
Also remember back in 1986 when your relative who had a computer did all his accounts on an IBM XT? You don't need gobs of computing power to do basic business functions...and remember the majority of businesses *anywhere* are small businesses with less than 10 employees.
Technology is also quite often culturally imbred....ever looked at how many consumer electronics devices are HUGE in Japan, but don't take off in the U.S.? It's that embedded cultural technology difference....and maybe with China having some homegrown options, they can develop systems that better meet the needs of their population.
Anyhoo, just my two cents.
-psy
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.
For now, that is. China has massive potential, and some day in the not too distant future the US CPU industry could be eating their dust. This event is not to be shrugged off lightly. It should be viewed as a call to arms by US chip developers. If they instead fall asleep at the wheel, things could end up quite ugly for them.
I am talking about raw performance here, BTW. The Chinese could some day produce chips that are faster than chips designed by the US. But that's not necessarily what's required for the Chinese to win. If they produce a chip with a very compelling price/performance ratio, that could also have a dramatic effect. Imagine a CPU with, as a theoretical example, half the speed of a top of the line Intel CPU, but for one tenth the price. The war might well be lost simply on this basis.
Looks like there'll be an alternative when all Intel and AMD are producing are Palladium chipsets and you'd rather not be "trusted" by Big Corps...
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Hook.
Line.
Sinker.
I can't believe this was modded to 4, Informative.
Congrats to the AC!
If the Chinese government can go around propping up Chinese industries until American businesses get torched and American workers get laid off, then why do it?
I mean, what's the point of being the only nation in town that believes in free trade when everyone else, including American importers, are using it to crush Americans at home.
F---- free trade.
This is my sig.
Reminds me of the line: "If you had let the government come up with the cure to Polio, you'd have the best iron lung in the world but you'd be no closer to a vaccine."
Schnapple
Does Tibet have any oil?
You're so cool.
I don't know Japanese, so I thought it was pretty cool. Certainly cooler (and less common) than yet another grumpy hater who's got to have the last word...why couldn't you just take your Funny mod and call it a night?
Many MS lovers are quite unaware of History. Wait, make that most US people totally ignore History.
The fact is that there was cheap computing before Microsoft. Several flavors of it, at that: CP/M which MS cloned, Sinclair, TRS-80... each had a thriving market with several vendors, and the CP/M had quite a MS-like effect of commoditising hardware.
What IBM, not MS, did with the PC was to create a middle ground between toy microcomputers and midrange computers that was powerful enough to run real numbers in it, and respectable enough to be bought for office usage.
One can argue that, were MS honest, it would have persisted in migrating its MS-DOS users to Xenix, and we'd have better quality systems today, perhaps even faster, perhaps even cheaper, perhaps simply more reliable. Even without MS being honest, the Unix vendors could have made it had they stopped trying to pull proprietary lock-in on their customers. There is no reason to believe that MS alone gave us commodity systems.
Not to mention cheap boxes are usually trash. I'd rather have a FireWire, SCSI, USB, PostScript system than a USB, IDE, PS/2, PCL system anytime...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
"China has a somewhat different IT policy to many Western nations."
Yes, China don't build a worldwide system to spy on their and foreign citizens (Echelon).
There seems a constant rush to dump current consumer chips and move on to something faster (like Moore's Law needs to be held up). This does not represent the needs of mass consumers - it represents the interests of corporations who want cash to keep winding the cycle upwards for greater and continued profit.
There is nothing wrong with a chip that does not compete with the latest specs. So many people believe that they need stellar specs - they need reliable, cost-effective chips that do their math.
People don't need much, we use office / openoffice because everyone else does. In China they can do their own thing with less bloated simple tools. Like a spruced up xedit. Such a system wont need more than a 10gb harddisk if even that.
Will be interesting to see what they pick as a browser and email client.
Ballpark guess at cost would be between $125 and $175 (w/o monitor). Depending on memory, drives, multimedia, etc.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
You are completely missing the point. The Chinese are not trying to make an Intell/AMD Killer. They are making a CPU with enough horsepower to run Linux and let people do office tasks - email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc... and other normal computing tasks. They are also making a CPU in-house, which means they don't need to worry about how Intel or AMD feels about them or even if the US government doesn't want them buying powerful chips.
This isan't about playing DOOM3 or Half-Life2. This is about China having an IT sector that is not subject to the whims of non-Chinese companies or governments.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
As I am interested in CPU architecture, I tried to find some technical info on the chip. I didn't found much, except a large powerpoint file which I failed to download. Slashdot effect? I wonder if they can read/produce such .ppt files under their Midori Linux ;-)
;-)
However, there is much more talk about their embedded character generator! This sounded very funny to me. A character generator in a CPU??!?!
After browsing around, I found that the vice president of Culturecom has been working 20 years with chinese character encodings. I guess the board of directors has a lot to say about what the chip real estate should be used for
I also found this link explaining somewhat more. (Is it normal practice for UCLA to comment on market opportunities for Chinese companies in scientific papers?)
Anyway, Culturecom seems to have invented an encoding for chinese characters that encodes brush strokes. This seems to be a good idea, and is likely superior to the outline encoding used in TrueType. It is probably a nice algorithm. But they don't seem to want to publish this algorithm. The idea is to "embed" it in a chip, and sell the chips instead. ($25) Maybe this makes sense in china where patents and copyrights are routinely violated, but I personally think that the chip real estate could probably have a better use.
Speaking of copyright violations; their web site says that they are selling Midori Linux for only $50. I wonder if that includes source code and a GPL license?
)9TSS
One other thing, 100 years ago, America was practically 3rd world in terms of labor conditions. There were labor riots, slave labor conditions, factories that burned down with the workers inside (fire escapes doors locked to prevent the workers from sneaking off), etc. etc. As economic prosperity increased, workers took it on themselves to see they got a share. We aren't talking about converting to communism (though certainly there were red groups), we're talking about fair labor standards, 40 hour work weeks, overtime laws etc. etc.
Also interesting, is that even though America started out as a handful of colonies - think plantations, export of raw materials on the cheap, cheap manufacturing (3d world style) - it eventually built itself into a first world economy. And interestingly, England's economy has remained first world all along. Truth is, a strong economy in the US, or Australia, or any other of England's colonies has not destroyed it at all.
In other words, if living/working conditions improve in China - it won't drive us back into the 3d world. In fact, the greatest hope for peace really is a rising standard of living in China. The majority of wealthy nations have relatively open governments and significant amounts of freedom for their citizens. This type of stability is bought only through the existance of a significant middle class. Desperate and impoverished people are far less likely to be peacable. Relatively well off people usually refuse to tolerate highly oppressive governments. This chip will be good for China, and for everyone else in many direct and indirect ways.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
> Yeah, and Hitler built the Autobahn.
I was thinking "what did the Romans ever do for us?" You're right on the spot there, even though I'm sort of a "left-wing" (non)whiner. Another question to ask is: what does it matter what you did for them, if the Tibetans don't want you?
Bush needed to divert the attention of his subjects from his incompetence in economic policy, which was killing millions of American through puverty
Killing millions of Americans through poverty?
That's horrible! Something would have to be done about that, if it weren't for the fact that you just made it up.
While I have my qualms about Bush's administration, I will still point out that a diatribe like the one you posted above does a piss-poor job of answering any real concerns. Pretending that Bush == Mao is asinine.
(Yeah, I object to getting searched at an airport, but comparing it to mass murder is the kind of hyperbole that makes it easy for the proponents of Ashcroft's program to dismiss any objectors as irresponsible.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The self righteous crowd got let out of its cage today. Lets address some concerns:
Humanitarianism:
The computer you're typing youre typing on was most likely made in a place you would describe as a horrible sweatshop if you would ever get to see it. Same goes for all sorts of computer related goods.
Lots of goods in general are clearly marked Made in China yet its this chip some people seem so focused on.
Also, please take into account the US and its own allies record on human rights before entering the morally ambigious grounds of "Bad country vs. Good country."
Propping up the industry
All countries do this. Corporate welfare, sweetheart deals, tariffs, etc. Look in your own backyard before you accuse the neighbors of being a nuscience.
"Its only a pentium II"
Lets see the PII burns very little energy, had almost 10 million transistors and 64 gigabytes of addressable memory. Not a bad chip to be compared to. I used to run Mandrake on a PII-350 and it would play Divx movies without a frame skip. We're not talking a 8086 chip here.
I'm not even going to go into how no one really needs a P4 at 2ghz to run Office and all the energy that wastes.
"Tibet!"
Whatever your thoughts on Tibet buying not not buying a Dragon chip will make no difference. Its like people refusing to drink French wine because of their position regarding Iraq. The French will not notice or care.
Also, Tibet was a theocratic slave state with no concept of civil rights either. Pot meet Kettle.
"China Bad, must punish."
Maybe not. By entering into normal trade relations we make their economy dependent on the world economy, i.e. it becomes a political check, do bad things, watch your economy collapse through sanctions. I'm no lassieze-faire globalisation nutcase, but this certainly beats isolationism by a wide margin. Business doesnt exist in a vacuum, there have been cultural exchanges for quite some time and I would rather see a positive bend on westernism than trans-atlantic namecalling and useless boycotts.
I'm an idealist too, but I know that I have bigger problems domestically and if I want to impose my view of the world onto other countries I'd rather be able to point to my backyard and say "this is how its done" as opposed to "you are bad, go away."
China is a totalitarian, aggresive, expansionist, military power.
WTF? CHINA is an aggresive (sic) expansionist military power? WTF? Are you on fucking crack? Or do you not understand what the word hypocrite means? The United States has military bases in Antarctica, Antigua and Barbuda, Austrailia, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Belgium, British Indian Ocean Territories, Canada, Columbia, Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, France (yes, France), Germany, Germany, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Honduras, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kwajalein Atoll, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Peru, Portgual, Saint Helena, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and Venezuela. But yeah, China is an aggresive (sic) expansionist military power. What the fuck ever. Get your head out of your ass, fucktard.
"I wonder why those dumb ass Chinese spend so much on defense. Must be plotting to take over the world or sumfin. I'm gonna get me another Coors Light and watch me some Fox News."
You fucking moron.
We don't, for example, worry so much about technology in the hands of the peaceful democratic country of South Korea.
The peaceful democratic country with 100 (count them, I would have listed them too if I wasn't so damn lazy) US military bases and 37,000 US soldiers. Gee, I wonder why we don't worry as much about technology there. It's a mystery. Please enlighten me Mr. Internet Genius Geek Boy.
Better check your "facts."
Tibet has been an independent country (even an empire at times) in Central Asia since about 1000 BCE. Tibet was taken over by the Chinese with help from the British in 1904. Go read up on Col. Younghusband's expedition. Basically, Tibet got caught in the middle of the "Great Game" between the British Indian Empire and the expansionist Russian Czars. The Chinese persuaded the Brits that Tibet was theirs. The Brits were happy to go along because the Chinese were a friendly semi-puppet of the West as a result of the Opium Wars. Tibet appeared to be talking with the Russian Czar, something the Brits could not tolerate. Tibet threw out the Chinese and restored their sovereignty after the Chinese revolution of 1911.
It was the CIA which was at least partly responsible for the 1959 problems. They were smuggling guns into Tibet with the help of the Nepalese. But giving guns to people who have such a reverence for life that they don't want to harm earthworms while digging irrigation trenches is not exactly a recipe for a successful revolution.
The Chinese did a rather thorough job of destroying Tibetan culture during the Cultural Revolution. Most of the monasteries were sacked, libraries burned, etc. Anyone trekking on the North side of Mt Everest can see the remnants of the Rongbuk Monastery for themselves. The Tibetans were forced to grow wheat in place of their native barley resulting in a bad famine during the 1960s[1]. The Chinese are currently moving large numbers of non-Tibetans into Tibet in order to reinforce their claims to Tibet by eventually dwarfing the native population.
Yes, Tibet was an oligarchical theocracy before the Chinese invaded. Funny how the senior lamas always seemed to be reincarnated into the upper crust families. But that is true today, too. Its just that the oligarchy is living in Bejing and the theology is now Communism (or whatever is left of it). Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...
Oh, and India was one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, quite friendly with the Soviet Union and not all that pro Western. In fact Nehru thought that India and China had a lot in common and was quite shocked when Mao took some strategic hills from India a few years after China conquered India.
[1] If you ever get into the Himalayas, check out the native barley beer known as chang. It is unfiltered, so you'll find the dregs floating in your cup. At 12,000+ ft altitudes it'll get you quite toasted quite fast.
FreeSpeech.org
You raise some valid points, but you need to come off your high horse. Back in the time when the USA was, what you call, a backward country, the US was all so pleased to get Fermi, Einstein fleeing totalitarian regimes in Europe (to name just a few). They did not come to their theories and research in isolation, but were a product of their environment and education in those countries. But they started or helped a developing industry and research in the US.
Later, the US even incited top leading researchers to go to the States, well in many cases, they had little choice, but it was better than being deported by the USSR.
In short, this has happened before (and was done by those that had little to protect or complain about, but are now the first to be scorned), and is happening again. Nothing new here, move along.
In times of world Economy, I am still dazzled to see that ppl seem to find reasons to protect their little countries (in fact, the country they are in can do anything they want, but everyone else should be good, unfair competition anyone?). I am just glad to see another alternative processor and in the long term, it can only benefit us with lower prices and better performance.
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
... and Israel is demolishing Palestinian houses on Palestinian land so that they can build the Berlin Wall #2.
Israel, which is defended by the US at all cost.
it's in my head
I got the impression that the whole distro is loaded into RAMDisk from a flash.
This really caught my eye because just recently on the Knoppix boards, a script has come out to load a whole Knoppix distro directly into RAMDisk.
I bet this is how it works and I think it's an awesome way to go. I want to try and load Morphix into 300 Megs of RAM using the script over at Knoppix. You could try it too! They say it's freakin' fast once you load everything into RAM.
I think it's interesting that the other popular desktops, MS and Apple, really don't have any incentive to go this way since it could potentially stall high end hardware sales and that's not really in their business interests.
After all, why do you need a bunch of hard drives if your OS is in RAM and you have cheap optical media for storage. And why do you need fast CPUs if your OS is already snappy as hell on an older --or newer, but slower, cheaper and less power hungry-- machines.
I think this is huge news. I knew it was coming, but I thought it would be awhile. I think the immersion lithography deal made it pointless to put things off anymore. The tech transfer is complete and it had jack to do with Taiwan. The Taiwanese are far too greedy. This was home grown all the way. I have no doubt.
"For now, that is. China has massive potential, and some day in the not too distant future the US CPU industry could be eating their dust. This event is not to be shrugged off lightly. It should be viewed as a call to arms by US chip developers. If they instead fall asleep at the wheel, things could end up quite ugly for them."
Finally! After 200 off topic left vs right messages someone gets the bigger picture.
Two more things that make this more than just another AMD nuisance for Intel. The Chinese will be integrating these into complete PCs by the millions, and their target will be lower price machines, not faster ones. Intel can wear AMD down in the race to make chips both faster and at a (relatively) lower cost, the final consumer machine based on these things will be phenomenally cheap.
Will American consumers turn down complete PCs for $100 or so just because they don't say "Intel Inside"? I don't think so.
If we want to keep any part of the PC hardware industry here in the US we had better start thinking more about cost. The end-user PC should be a dirt cheap device by now. Make bigger margins on servers, no problem, but for the end user, a toaster sized box with little or nothing left to add for $100 or so is all you need. Of course there is still one outrageously priced component of the typical end-user PC that I haven't mentioned that is going to have to drastically change (hint: not the monitor either).
The other interesting questions is: What will these machines do to the DRM concept if they are readily available world-wide? Lets see, should I get the expensive DRM limited machine with the bloated operating system, or should I "settle" for this cheap import with the slick new operating system and no limits on what I can do? Decisions, decisions...
Sure... if you redefine the word socialist to be so broad that it includes a vast number of people not normally thought of as socialist. Your definition seems to be "putting the collective above the individual and encouraging people to die for their country". Well, first off, "encouraging people to go and die for their country" is not exactly an innovation. It's as old as the hills. It's not exactly a good distinguishing characteristic. What monarchy, dictatorship, democracy or totalitarian system hasn't tried to dupe its population with patriotism?
Secondly, as for "putting the collective above the individual". If by that you mean putting the State above individual rights, sure, then Julius Caesar was a socialist, then notorious torturer General Pinochet was a socialist, then Dubya is a socialist.
But that's simply fatuous. That definition is way too broad.
If you mean putting the general welfare (i.e. the welfare of the whole population) above all individual rights, that's actually a self-contradictory definition! How can you assert that Hitler looked after the general welfare while persecuting the Jews, the communists, the gays, other political opponents, and generally striking fear into people's hearts?
It would be like calling a govenor who regularly rounds up and shoots 1% of the population of a state, a "benevolent ruler". It's rubbish. That's not looking after the general welfare, it's tyrrany.
For the same reason, I would argue that Stalin and Pol Pot, for example, were not socialists or communists, despite the fact that they used that kind of rhetoric.
For a better definition, I would refer you to the MSF:
That, in a nutshell, is what contemporary socialism is all about. It's not terribly complicated. Hitler, as the leader of a racist, far-right-wing political party, was the very opposite of socialist.I could also say "Hitler was a conservative. That's a fact."... if I define "conservative" as "racist bigot". You can say anything you like if you redefine the words... but that's not a very convincing form of argument.
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