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?"

Comments

This means....

[linguae]

...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.

Re:This means....

[TheRaven64]

Well, discounting the fact that you can buy StrongARM based PCs (most running RiscOS) and have been able to for about a decade, why aren't we seeing more of them? Even at 600MHz, they draw practically no power, so they would make an ideal chip for a silent desktop - especially combined with a few GB of flash instead of a hard disk and a decent amount of RAM to act as cache. Since the chips are currently fabbed for the embedded market, there is no question that they would not be able to keep up with demand.

The Lexra story

[morcheeba]

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)

MIPS R10K is actually pretty zippy.

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Something to be far more worried about for USA

[CdBee]

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.

Re:legal challenge for exporting...

[Triskele]

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...

Re:So now intellectual property is good

[Bert64]

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..