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China Releases 2nd generation MIPS Chip
eldawg writes writes with news of the launch of a second-generation Chinese 64-bit MIPS CPU. "The Godson-2 or 'Dragon' went into production last week. News reports indicate that, 'The CPU is 95% MIPS compatible using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of the MIPS architecture, which is owned by the American company MIPS Technologies...The Godson-2 is pretty much a copy of the MIPS R10000 which makes it on par with 1995 technology.' The Chinese plan on using these chips in consumer electronics for the local market, but one can assume that they will eventually end up in exported electronic goods. I wonder if MIPS Technology will sit idly by when this happens?"
A few points-
1. This processor is 95% MIPS compatible. I understand incompatible, and 100% compatible. What do they mean by this?
2. You're right that this is mainly a PR release- and though it doesn't flat-out say that this processor infringes on any MIPS patents, it's certainly implied. You seem to be strongly implying that this processor *doesn't* infringe on any MIPS patents. Do you have any facts about this, or is it your intuition?
3. If the Godson-2 is "pretty much a copy of the MIPS R10000" that seems to make performance claims (rather than just saying it's "MIPS compatible"). I'm not sure your Opteron-8086 analogy architecture analogy holds up.
Good catch that this is was a PR release.
I support localized technology. Where is everyone's capitalist spirit of competition, anyway? I'm eager to see what more China has to offer to the future.
Its only 95% compatible because they didn't implement some instructions that are patented by MIPS presumably so they can sell products using them in the U.S. without getting sued and without paying MIPS any royalties.
... fab equipment makers who want to partner with them while they steal .... err .... license their technology.
The Chinese are masters at avoiding the payment of royalties for IP.
The worst problem they have is their fab technology is a couple generations out of date. They are actively seeking suckers... err
I get the impression that chip equipment makers are one of the few industries that have seen the peril in partnering with China, turning over all their IP to them, and then being put of business by them. I wonder why other industries weren't so bright.
@de_machina
The parent post is right... many undergraduate level of computer architecture classes in colleges use MIPS as the basis of the first microprocessor that students develop. Mainly because it is a quite simple ISA.
...alternate architectures aren't dead yet. It's nice to know that some alternatives to the x86 juggernaut are still live and kicking. I wonder if China will make MIPS-based personal computers or workstations? If these new processors are powerful enough, I might import a MIPS-based PC for some nice assembly hacking.
It would nice to see a day where the x86 juggernaut is effectively challenged.
I've been working a project that uses the MIPS-I compatible Lexra 4180, and in my research I found they were basically sued out of business by MIPS for creating a clone. This link -- the Lexra story -- is a good summary. From that article: MIPS Technologies claimed that because an exception handler could be created to emulate the function of unaligned loads and stores in software with many other instructions Lexra's processors infringed the patent. It was claimed to basically be a patent infringement case because the instruction set used the patented unaligned load feature. (I just coded this into my mips disassembler -- it takes two instructions to process, but the benefit is that it looks like it would be much easier to implement in hardware)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
If China were to rely on its own internal R&D, it might never catch up with the major industrialized nations, and that's unacceptable to Chinese leadership. (And it should be!) They need to get closer than they are now before they can start trying to be more self-sufficient.
I really think the cold hard fact of the situation is that, for all the progress China has made, it's soon going to hit a bar. For example, if they're ten years behind us now, I don't know they'll ever get closer than five years. And the reason is their government. Once that goes, China will finally be able to realize its potential. And yeah, I recognize that its potential will probably involve grinding America into dust - as an American I'm not entirely sanguine about that - but if it's a free country, I know we'll be able to get along. Just like, despite our well-documented problems with France and vice versa, there's barely been a blip in our relations with Europe. Democracies really can't stand to be enemies, no matter how hard they try.
Better yet...why stop at the Chinese? Why not kill everyone living on Earth right now? I mean...it will obviously take care of all our problems with other countries...
Get real, you couldn't kill a race by genetic makeup, because there is too much similarity to create a virus that would only target race. Besides, what would get accomplished if you tried such a thing?
Fucking racist...
All these media outlets and propaganduh can say all they want, all I know is there will come a time when I will still be able to compute FREELY using my cheap Kung-Pau-Dragon-Godson-V-Dear-Leader processor when all of you Linux zealots are just sitting there facing a blank EFI boot prompt :D
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
If you've ever used an R10k Silicon Graphics workstation, you'll know that these MIPS chips are pretty beefy. The floating point performance in particular on modern MIPS chips is spectacular. (R14k chips are used in Tezro currently)
There's a REASON Silicon Graphics used MIPS chips in their systems until recently. (and they only switched to x86 stuff due to economic pressure, not performance...)
I have a dual processor R12k SGI Octane on my desk and it still beats my brand new P4 out on a LOT of tasks. And that's a seven year old machine....
Plus, these are 64-bit chips.
Sure, the R10k processor is "from 1995". But SGI's policy at the time THEY were using MIPS R10k chips in their $50k workstations was to factor of ten beat everything else on the market. Meaning, their systems were engineered to be at least ten times as powerful as the competition (and ten times the price to boot).
So... Knockoff R10k MIPS chips, built with modern advancements, smaller dies, and scaled to higher clock rates, will perform VERY WELL comparatively. In fact, for some tasks, (floating point) the chip should compete quite well with a P4 1.5 Ghz... and probably be a whole hell of a lot cheaper. And 64 bit I might add.
And since there are already designs for systems with massive numbers of MIPS R10K nodes (Origin 2000 for example) which are considered to be "junk" it's not hard to imagine knockoff supercomputers....
/.ers, better embrace 'em!
These will soon be the only CPUs on the market that don't have treacherous computing extensions
Good thing Linux runs well on old/slow hardware...
China is buying Treasury stock in very large amounts and "owning" your government
In soaking up dollops of US debt, China helps the Federal Reserve to keep American interest rates low, sustaining high levels of American consumer spending. Yet, members of Congress are not up in arms about this form of dependence.
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Oddly enough much of what you say about China was said about the USA a hundred years ago. You might want to look into the way USAian companies ripped off European copyrights & patents to produce cheap knock-offs. For a while Europe ignored this (Charles Dickens went to the USA to protest against his books being stolen) until the USA tried to export its knock-offs over in Europe. 100 years later we still haven't harmonised our IP laws...
--
USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
They should build an Alpha clone! The chinese could bring back the Alpha, and possibly legitimately too, i doubt HP would put up much resistance to licensing out the Alpha specs to a chinese company, it's not like they're using it themselves..
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China should have been kept in isolation until their commie system collapsed
The 'commie system' did collapse. China is no longer communist by any reasonable measure (if they ever were).
They're certainly totalitarian (so is communism in practice, but although communism-->totalitarian, the converse isn't necessarily true), and an indication that you can have capitalism without democracy.
In fact, the Americans assumed that by supporting China's move towards capitalism, power would become diffused and there would be more vested interest in not seeking conflict with the US. They did not believe that China would get this far without much greater decentralisation of power than has actually happened.
To some extent, I think they believed their own propoganda (capitalism --> democracy). I also think they wanted a slice of that *very* large market and figured they had a long enough spoon to sup with the Chinese government.
and they were ready to embrace a more open system of government
As I mentioned above, the Americans assumed that capitalism would lead to more open government. Now China is (for example) beginning to compete with the US for oil, many are having misgivings about this.
Incidentally, keep an eye on Zimbabwe; Mugabe is importing vast quantities of goods from China, and there is evidence that he is seeking to ally with them (I'm assuming that China are equally interested in Zimbabwe's resources). It's a very good explanation as to why he's tearing down street markets and basically destroying his country; leaves it open for Chinese goods to flood the market.
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That might not matter
Lexra trapped these, and you could write an emulator in software, but it still got sued. The case was settled out of court as far as I can see.
http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Lexra
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
At least from my point of view (and I agree this probably is flawed) the general view amongst my crowd here in the U.S. is that the majority of businesses like this have some sort of semi-invisible Chinese government backing behind the scenes with the sole intent of kicking our economic asses. They seem to be pretty effective, too.
Yes, pretty much. The wars of the 21st century will be economic, and China is the greatest threat. Chinese culture is alien to the mass majority of U.S. citizens, and while our own culture and current state of affairs aren't exactly "pristine" many of us view the Chinese political system with disguist (though the current US administration is good competition for this in my book).
As an anecdote, I live in a fairly nice condo complex with a pretty good mix of nationalities. FWIW the folks from India (and even Pakistan heaven forbid) are amiable and friendly. The Chinese are asocial, insular, and act like they're from another planet. Then again the Japanese were like that around here in the 80's...
sometimes i wonder if the chinese govenment has people to do their astro turfing for them. This almost reminds me of the post there was no student uprising in China in the late 80s...
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
If chinese culture "holds education dear and promotes getting as much of it as possible", then why is the Communist Party a "godsend" for the education of the Chinese people?
because education wasn't free or available to the public until the chinese eliminated the classes that exist in china previously.
a people can admire something without being able to ever have a chance at it.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?