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

Midori -- Stale Distro?

[jalexand]

Why would they ship with a linux distro that hasn't been updated in two years?

Re:Midori -- Stale Distro?

[Mostly a lurker]

they are using the Midori distro because of the support for written Chinese (not specific on the dialect)

When dealing with the Chinese written language, dialect is more or less irrelevant. The only issue is whether to support 'traditional' or 'simplified' Chinese characters. In mainland China, simplified characters (introduced when the communists took control) is usually desired. In Taiwan and elsewhere, traditional characters are usually employed. When using Unicode, this is almost entirely a font issue. When using older doublebyte character sets, the appropriate encoding system must be supported. I am not absolutely certain, but I think Midori supports everything commonly used.

China is enormous

[buffer-overflowed]

And will be an enormous economic force in years to come.

If they reduce their reliance on foreign IP (or non-free foreign IP) as well as foreign hardware, this can only be good for China, and only be bad for us (Less money flow into the IT industry) unless they produce a higher quality product (thus improving the industry).

However, in the short term, you know, MS won't make as much money, neither will Intel, and I'm sure a lot of /.ers are really happy about that.

My random observation

[Bryan Ischo]

I spent a good deal of time in China a couple of years back. All I have to say is, the many people whom I met all over the country were honest and worked very hard, and I think that they deserve better living conditions than they currently have.

Their government is slowly but surely making progress towards a more reasonable form, and I hope that news technology developments like this are harbingers of improvement in their economy and the lives of the Chinese people in general.

Fire-Breathing Dragon Burns Americans and Tibetans

[reporter]

For a country that is as backward as mainland China, possessing the ability to make a high-performance 32-bit pipelined microprocessor is a tad surprising. However, when you think of the intimate relationship between Taiwan and mainland China, you realize that the technology for the Dragon microprocessor came from Taiwan. So, things are not that surprising.

Consider the following.

1. The constitution of the Chinese living in Taiwan supports the integration of both Tibet and Mongolia into mainland China. While Tibetans suffer and die at the hands of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, the Chinese in Taiwan support integrating Tibet into "One China".
2. The Chinese son of the chairman of a powerful conglomerate in Taiwan has joined with the son of Jiang Zemin, the butcher of Tibet, to build an advanced silicon-wafer factory in Shanghai. (reference: "Sons of prominent Chinese team up on chip venture")
3. Senior Chinese military officials retired from the Taiwanese military have gone to mainland China and given military secrets about the American F-16 fighter jet to the Beijing government. (reference: "Military secrets on sale to China")
4. The Wall Street Journal reports that the majority of American spies who steal sensitive computer and military technology (like microprocessor blueprints) to give to mainland China are actually born and raised in Taiwan. Both spies mentioned in "Two Men Arrested for Planning to Smuggle High-Tech Encryption Devices to China" are born and raised in Taiwan.

In other words, we Americans should blame ourselves. Why? American companies, especially those in Silicon Valley, employ hordes of Chinese from Taiwan. When they are given lucrative opportunities in mainland China, they will seize those opportunities. Some of those opportunities involve giving sensitive American technology to Beijing. We did this to ourselves; we made it easy for the Taiwanese to give American technology to Beijing.

This hemorrhaging of technology will continue until we in the United States of America (USA) wake up. We should treat Taiwan as a province of China. When we slap punitive sanctions against China, we should also apply those sanctions against Taiwan. If we do not want to give sensitive technology to China, then we should not give sensitive technology to Taiwan. Period.

Several companies in Silicon Valley prohibit Chinese nationals from working on technologies deemed sensitive by the American government. Yet, those very same companies readily employ Taiwanese nationals to work on the same sensitive technologies. Folks, let's wake up before the fire-breathing dragon burns us Americans along with the Tibetans.

"In line with the Chinese government's IT policy"

[rocky28]

Did anybody else here read the article?

Did this line send shivers down your spine?

While I applaud the effort to give cheap computing to the underpriviliged masses in China, this may be cause for concern

The fact that a government that still seems to be fairly interested in tramping on all forms of dissidence is involved enough with the OS and hardware so that it falls "in line with the Chinese government's IT policy", makes me a little nervous.

This isn't unusual, MS has always tailored their products so that they fit in with the IT policies of western nations. But from what I have read, China has a somewhat different IT policy to many Western nations.

An IT policy which drives everything underground, away from the policing ears.

Re:Sure i'll buy one

[jcr]

Yeah, and Hitler built the Autobahn. So what?

All of the statements above are true, but it is also true that the oligarchal theocracy of the Dalai Llama never had anyone killed for trying to leave the country.

Also, you omitted the overriding reason for the invasion of Tibet: Mao needed to divert the attention of his subjects from his incompetence in agricultural policy, which was killing millions of chinese through starvation.

Far better to gloat about how the Tibetans were "liberated" (and gloss over the fact that the subjects of the Mao Dynasty were just as much enslaved as the Tibetans had ever been), than to let people talk about how many villages had been wiped out by the PLA for having the affrontery to try to keep enough of their harvest to stay alive for another year.

Mao 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 Stalin's record.

You left-wing whiners sure like to cut history's greatest mass-murderer a lot of slack, don't you?

-jcr

Re:Dragons /.'d Already

[EinarH]

The last time this was up on slashdot someone mentioned performance equivalent to a Intel P2 450 MHz. Since this is a RISC CPU it will of course be stronger in diffrent areas but that is another discussion.

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. With a cost per CPU probably between $20-30* I would be all over tis offer.
From a customers wiewpoint competition in the Quad-motherboard is appreciated as these MB's today cost insane amounts of money.

All this depends on wheter they have added propper SMP support which is propably difficalt as they try to stay away of "IP" issues.

*Wild guess of course, but they just can't cost above $30 if they expect them to sell in China.