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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?"
News reports indicate that, 'The CPU is 95% MIPS compatible using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of
Unauthorized and unlicensed - duh, of course it is. That does NOT per se make it illegal and it certainly does not mean it is "stolen". Anyone can implement an instruction set (there are decades of precendent for this) - while our system may be really fucked up when it comes to thing like business method patents, on processor architecutre (and electronics in general) it is clear: it's the implementation that counts, NOT the idea.
the MIPS architecture, which is owned by the American company MIPS Technologies...
Do you mean "implementations of which have been successfully licensed by MIPS, but frankly it's a well documented and relatively simple RISC instruction set
that a single person with a few years VHDL experience can implement"? See OpenCores for an example.
The Godson-2 is pretty much a copy of the MIPS R10000 which makes it on par with 1995 technology.'
So WTF are the latest Opteron processors? On par with 1978 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.
One can be assured that cheaper processors will find their way into everything. Nice try insinuating that the EVIL CHINESE are deliberately out to screw us by EMBRACING CAPITALISM!
I wonder if MIPS Technology will sit idly by when this happens?"
I wonder if MIPS has a choice. See AMD vs Intel ca. 1991
All they need to do is create a knock off copy of the Mac Mini and sell it for $99 USD. They can call it the Red Mini Star. :P
The Godson-2 is pretty much a copy of the MIPS R10000 which makes it on par with 1995 technology.
Which is excellent for vintage music lovers like myself, because all the hardware I've used since 1996 and on has absolutely refused to play my Ace of Base MP3s.
If it's a copy of 1995 technology, and patents last 10 years, I wonder if they're violating anything important.
If MIPS cannot make its own chips live longer, then it's definitely a good thing that chinese copy it "illegally" and find a usage as embedded consumer processors. MIPS had its 15 minutes, now it's over, they should be grateful that at least their architecture is still used for some obscure stuff.
Wow this was great evil-Chinese propaganda.
I am going to kick in the balls the first person who makes an R/L joke and calls this a "LISC" processor.
From the article:
... A bit more complex then the Hennasy and Patterson (The Classic!) book on computer arch and cpu design, but not by much. Given what (admittedly little) the article said about China's CPU fabs, I wonder if the newest Xilinx or Altera FPGA's could implement the design and run it faster ..
"The move still shows that China is capable of designing complex microprocessors."
As is any junior level class in computer engineering
I always prefer to start the year off with a bang - or, to be more precise, a series of loud hums, a crackle or two, and
They are more likely to be used in printers and such consumer electronics.
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.
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.
Marlon Brando is the godfather?
"The Register" has a better write up on this story (sorry guys). Apparently they've managed to get Windows CE, Linux, and VxWorks up and running on the CPU.
As for the patented instruction sets, apparently they aren't used in the chip. (Supposedly that's why it's 95% compatible).
Currently the chip clocks in at 400-500Mhz, but the next generation is going to be around the 1Ghz mark - by which point China is going to be spitting out all manner of sub $200 computers I imagine.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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.
It will not run a pirated copy of MS Windows, so at least one big american company is happy with it. If it performs as an R10000, I do not mind running linux on it though, at least not when it is matched with a good video card (2D only needed).
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
What are you talking about? /only uses the S controller...you know...the one that Microsoft originally designed for the Asian market... //best controller I have ever had the opportunity of using on a console
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...
Funny, that was once said about Japanese products as well.
Learned a long time ago to ignore any political opinions given by computer scientists because agree with them and they'll just say the opposite. So after the whining about companies banning replication of their video codecs and software, it's now bad for China to replicate MIPS compatability.
Nevertheless, compatability with the MIPS standard seems like the most trivial thing they could have copied. There are much harder problems to overcome in building a CPU than what spec to follow. The MIPS spec doesn't define how to mass produce very precise arrangements of semiconductor features for the least amount of money. It doesn't define how to dissipate heat and reduce power consumption.
Also, one day people are going to figure out that whatever China's government says, it's 10 years behind their current status. China's government says its economy is only growing at 5%. In reality it's growing at 10%. They say they won't finish the olympic stadium until 2008. It's finished now. They say 3 gorges won't become operational until 2010. It's operational now.
So what do you think the current state of Chinese technology is now that their government says they're at 1995 levels?
This article here gives some insight into the sots of problems the Chinese may have if they try to enter the USA market.
I hope that by the time they choose to enter the market, they have enough money/power to sustain the legal battle.
The MIPS company people sound like asses.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Thanks for that link.
Unless there's a lot more that the guy is telling, this is a very clear case of IP laws directly impeding the industry.
btw, does anyone know what kind of air force china has?
They have MIGs that shoot napalm, and if two or more MIGs shoot their missiles on the same target, it will cause a firestorm. They are especially powerful if China has upgraded to black napalm. Also, if you are facing the nuke general, beware of nuke MIGs.
China also has the Helix helicopter. It is pretty slow, but can be upgraded with a gatling gun, bunker or a propaganda tower, AND napalm bombs. Those napalm bombs are very lethal to ground troops.
you must not be old enough to remember when Japan was going to buy everything.
That didn't pan out either.
-xski
Wow, a 4-issue in order MIPS? That's adorable :)
you must not be old enough to remember when Japan was going to buy everything.
Except back then America was blooming, and actually meant something to the world.
Please jog my memory, but what did America last produce and manufacture again? I'm talking about culture.. NOT.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Linux is not Windows
The title of the previous story on /. :
"Japan Wants to Build 10 Petaflop Supercomputer"
LOL :)
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...
ever heard of sickle cell?
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
Yeah but Japan or South Korea are not a pseudo-communist dictatorships like China is. I doubt that salaries will go up taking education with it, making China loose it's price edge forcing it to make better quality stuff instead. It's just exploiting cheap labour and nothing short of a revolution will make things change for them.
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
Sounds like a pretty tough army. At least they haven't reverse engineered those underground warp tunnels... yet.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
American patents don't apply in China, so by definition no patent has been violated - even if a case could be made in the states. American law doesn't stretch a single foot outside of American borders, at least when it comes to countries the U.S. can't conquer or cow into submission.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Yyyyyeah. The Japanese have a mania for quality and a well-earned reputation for hard work. The Chinese have nothing of the sort - they just want to get ahead, and they will cheerfully screw you over, even when you're sure to discover it. Trust me, I know. Did the Japanese ship empty containers to customers back in the 60s?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's just exploiting cheap labour and nothing short of a revolution will make things change for them.
As a sinologist and former resident of China, I disagree whole-heartedly.
You have to remember -- when considering education for the Chinese people, the Communist Party has been a godsend. Under the communist government literacy has increased over a thousand percent.
Chinese culture, as the father of all East Asian cultures, holds education dear and promotes getting as much of it as possible. Their college system is still sub-par when compared to the rest of the world, and when compared to S. Korea or Japan, but it is rapidly improving. Their top schools compete with the world's top schools. Their local schools have been providing valuable training in business management, among other skills, that have allowed the Chinese economy to boom as it has been booming.
And that won't stop. In 50 years they will no longer be the cheap-labor capital of the world, because they will have raised the education bar to a level much higher than it is.
Only then will "revolution" make any sense. Anything before then will just put in a government that is MUCH worse than the current government.
If you want to understand a country's progression towards democracy, you should read books on international development -- especially "second track" or "citizens" diplomacy. The leaders in that field have studied successful migrations to democracy and have learned that democracy fails when "democratic norms" are not in place. Those include education and an entrepreneurial-type business culture (and a stable economy that isn't dependent on the government), among other things.
Until those democratic norms have been established, any democracy would collapse.
Look at Taiwan -- they were a military dictatorship until 1988, and the people who fled to Taiwan had, on average, very high education levels. Even then it took 40 years to bring democracy.
Look at Russia -- Putin is getting more and more powerful, and the people support him. Why? Because they would rather have a burgeoning economy and stability than have democracy.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
....stating that OSX has been secretly running on MIPS for the last 4 years as a backup backup plan
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The Chinese have nothing of the sort - they just want to get ahead, and they will cheerfully screw you over, even when you're sure to discover it.
That's quite a generalization to make.
I spent 7 years in China -- I was never "screwed." I've been screwed by American businesses, though -- but I don't assume all Americans are corrupt and manipulative.
China is like ebay -- it is a developing economy where little is established, including oversight.
that happens in any economy. china might be slightly worse because there was (and is, though less now) a lot of corruption in the government and in the government-sponsored industries.
But were things any different when America had an undeveloped economy 100 years ago? Even today there are plenty of illegitimate companies. I have worked for the U.S. commercial service and plenty of U.S. companies have exported products to the country I was based that were defective or took the payment then ran. It's an embarassment -- and I'm stuck trying to convince the foreign importer that he should still try to buy U.S. exports...
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
has MIPS or anybody still got in stock? or could ramp up production? Nowhere near enough for Chinese demand that's for sure. Just imagine the hissing and roaring if the Chinese bought from a European supplier. Watch MIPS quietly pass a few of these oriental devices thru their labs to verify quality, then future buyers get referred to MIPS "Western Pacific Agents"
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.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I find it fascinating how the submitter chose to highlight these chips were developed in China, rather than BLX IC, the /company/ that has designed these chips. I'm sure there's numerous other companies in China producing various general purpose processors as well. When Intel or ATI comes out with a new processor, there aren't many who talk about America or Canada designing a new chip.
Is it commonplace for people in the US to consider China as some monolithic, communist production machine where the entire state works for one 'company'?
Or if they shifted to a democracy from thier current political enviroment. Theyd choke and corupt and become nothing under the current population problem, and massive rebuilding effort... and did i mention the population. How are you going to organise an election with half a billion people voting... the USA can barely manage a fair election with 250 million or so. (dont quote me on that, I dont live there :P )
XML - A clever joke would be here if
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.
Does it run NetBSD?
XML - A clever joke would be here if
very good read , on linuxdevices they add to that article
l
"although AMD has reportedly encouraged BLX and MIPS to "settle their differences," the article suggests."
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9828238951.htm
developer http://flamerobin.org
Mostly old Russian knockoffs and stuff. MiG-21,25,29,31, and choppers. But even their main infantry assault rifle is a copy of the AK-47... their military is large but not as advanced as some other nations...
and without doubt China will care. Oh no, wait a minute. HA HA HA HA HA! As if they'll give a ....
China only wants a very very cheap processor for their appliances. So they would not want to pay for the design or invest in a new one. Maybe one day everything (TVs, refrigerators, whatever...)will have one of these...
People buy chinese goods today simply because they are cheaper. Most of the factories there currently making cheap stuff could dial up quality control if demand for the quality goods justified the increased cost of production. AFAIK this happened with Japan too.
is the grand parent post from a video game where you play against/as China or real life?
sounds more like a game with the mention of underground warp tunnels, but i'm quite tired and just making sure.
The current Party leadership is very corrupt. The only hope to clean that up is democracy, which is why they fear it; ideologically they're hardly communist at all now.
How are you going to organise an election with half a billion people voting... the USA can barely manage a fair election with 250 million or so
India manages.
I have to say, most of the comments here can be conluded into one option that non-Western people can never make any progress or advantage in technology, or it's stolen from western world. i wonder how eastern people looked at west in 300 years ago, e.g. Tang Dynasty. With the same logic, almost all the western people after that are thieves. With the same logic, western people's foolishness and selfishness are shown so clearly here. BTW, there is a very basic and universal principle in law, who claims, who gives the evidence. It should be MIPS to find evidence, not Chinese to prove they are legal.
you used "its" twice, "it's" once, and all three correctly. how did you manage that?
I don't get the reference to Hennesy and Patterson at all here, while they do indeed discuss the implementation of pipelined chips with the Mips as the running example they do it on a high level. Doing an efficient implementation of even only the parts discussed in the book requires doing the actual clever implementation work of large portions of logic not really touched upon. Even things that are discussed are in so general terms that the books worth as a practical guide to actually building a modern chip is fairly low (it is an introductionary book after all). In addition they don't even discuss the issues involved in a chip of this level, notable missing parts are OoO logic and the FPU and so on (again understandable since it is an introduction).
Don't compare the R10000 to the stuff that a CS class hobbles together (which also tends to be a very small portion of a complete chip), it is an insult to all of computer architecture if anything.
So, the R10000 was very much state of the art in 1995, and is still doing fairly well today (the R160000 is pretty much the same core, just shrunk and tuned). If China has made an equivalent it is proof enough that they can make a competitive chip.
Between the software patents in europe, the DMCA in the US and the state of the current patent system, It is getting harder to produce software in the patent minefield that is the western world.
9/11 should have shown us what happens when determined people who aren't bound by laws and corporate greed want to get things done. The tech industry no longer has a "just do it" kind of attitude, as it crawls along, waiting for a lawsuit to blindside them.
With even reverse engineering outlawed by the DMCA, consumers are locked into the first product to appear on the market, and making an alternative, even a better one is a futile exercise.
Face it, with fewer laws, tech advancement using reverse engineering, and those one man hackers like DVD jon, Russia and china are operating with a freedom that allows them to bring the best they have to the fore, without limitations. Without serious patent reform, the US will NOT be at the forefront of technology for much longer.
A brief description with picture of the chip:u /0312/258718.html/
u /0312/258719.html/
http://www.pconline.com.cn/pchardware/foreline/cp
A 13-page write-up documenting the tough work and challenges faced by one of the chip scientists (e.g. pipelines/branch-prediction/cache design, packaging, etc...):
http://www.pconline.com.cn/pchardware/foreline/cp
Interesting bits from those Chinese sites:
- (back in 2003) they're already running Linux on it, with applications such as MP3 audio/mpeg movie playing, Mozilla, OpenOffice, games...
- (back in 2003) Max clock 300MHz, 1-2W power consumption, 1% CPU load for playing MP3, 23% for mpeg movie, SPEC_CPU2000 score of 300
- will reach 1GHz by early 2006
- it will be used in low-cost PC with price RMB1,000
- the 3rd gen of the chip will incorporate multi-core design
Especially ignoance of spelling.
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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This almost certainly has nothing to do with the original story. She illegally exported (not stole - they were bought and paid for, probably legally, in the US) specialist microprocessors for low-temperature use. They were probably also really slow.
This story is about a general-purpose microprocessor which ought to be a lot faster (if less durable). Besides, reverse-engineering isn't neccesarily any faster than designing from scratch.
It's 4 MiGs :D
I have to say, most of the comments here can be concluded into one option that
non-Western people can never make any progress or advantage in technology, or it's stolen from western world.
i wonder how eastern people looked at west in 300 years ago, e.g. Tang Dynasty.
With the same logic, almost all the western people after that are thieves.
With the same logic, western people's foolishness and selfishness are shown so clearly here.
BTW, there is a very basic and universal principle in law, who claims, who gives the evidence. It should be MIPS to find evidence, not Chinese to prove they are clean.
The US International Trade Commission can issue an exclusion order which allows US Customs to seize products that violate US patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Unless there's a lot more that the guy is telling, this is a very clear case of IP laws directly impeding the industry.
Actually, it sounds more like a case of lawsuits impeding the industry (with a little help from IP laws). Apparently, MIPS Technology didn't actually win the lawsuit, they just dragged it on until Lexra ran out of money; it's an old trick...
We will see them in Walmart piled from ceiling to floor with little yellow smiley faces saying "we roll back price. you buy mips now. we own all your base."
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What I want to know is if these will operate in Apostle Clusters... or if they are only intended to be used in postmodern Left Behind environments.
No wait, I see they are destined for use in robotics.
In fact, almost everything you own that is of "quality", whether it is American or Japanese of design and label, was probably manufactured in China. China DEFINITELY has capacity for quality.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
They are the US's third-biggest trade partner, which means we wield a pretty big stick.
... during which the US consumer goods sector would look pretty grim.
Actually, that means they wield a pretty big stick with us. The fact that we're probably their largest trade partner means we wield a big stick, but there's no getting around the fact that if we stopped trading with China today (for whatever reason), the economy would take a nosedive. Sure, we might be able to replace our source for everything they give us (don't be so sure, they make a lot of stuff, and there isn't a huge surplus of any of it in other nations), but even then it would take months
The US and China trade with each other so much that it's kind of a symbiotic relationship. Neither of our economies would be nearly as powerful without the other. That's why you never read about any threats between these two nations. (Idiotic comments by brutish Chinese generals notwithstanding.) Both sides know they can't do it without the other.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Because the AK47 is capable of taking more abuse? the only thing I HATE about firing the AK47 that the AR15/M16 doesn't do, is eject the cartidge case right onto my head. I've gotten AK47 cases in the eye before. Can't fricking explain it, but it happens. :-/ Maybe a defective receiver, I don't know, but it sucked firing that thing. I had better accuracy at 100y with the AK, though. And it sounds nastier. :-)
Not even the brightest CS junior, or even the brightest (lone) CS grad student in any institution all over the world can design something with the complexity of the R10000, which was a fairly sophisticated design. The Chinese have access to very recent process technologies and can easily design and build a simpler processor that would beat your puny FPGA-implemented broken design in a heartbeat. Their goal is to build a base on which they can build a competitive CPU design infrastructure for their local industry.
I found your post mildly disturbing, with an air of superiority that seems to assume that CPU design is an American specialty of some sort. Many of us who work in CPU design and implementation got our graduate degrees from American universities, where an overwhelming majority of the graduate students in our group were foreign. Your CPU's are already being designed by non-Americans, so this might be a good time to get over it. Also, there is much more to talking about microprocessor design than taking a junior level Verilog class, perusing the Hennessy & Patterson book and maybe reading a few ISCA papers. I suggest you take a look at the R10000 paper published in IEEE Computer some years back.
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But were things any different when America had an undeveloped economy 100 years ago?
Well, let's see. There's this little thing called a Constitution...
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
the only thing I HATE about firing the AK47 that the AR15/M16 doesn't do, is eject the cartidge case right onto my head.
Mine did that too - I think the only way around it is to fire tilted.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Until those communistic norms have been established, any communist state would collapse
Unfortunately, communistic norms have meant murder or imprisonment for dissent. Ask the victims of Tiananmen Square or the Cultural Revolution about norms.
"...and yet, I blame society" Duke - Repo Man
They own other commercial enterprises in China. I'd like to know because I would like to avoid funding their activities. I feel a moral obligation to avoid buying bullets for their guns and treads for their tanks.
On Friday, the Chinese government scrapped the link between the US dollar and the Yuan. The link is the reason Chinese people and products have been so cheap for the last decade or so.
With the link scrapped, the Yuan is going to increase in value, making Chinese people and Chinese products more expensive.
This is going to mean less, not more offshoring to China in the future. Other AsiaPac countries co-ordinated similar moves at the same time.
Deleted
So I have read here and else where that they intend on using a version of Linux and their own CPU's so that they do not have dependance on American tech.
Is being 95% compatable with MIPS enough to get a MIP's Linux kernel up and running or would they have to patch the bejesus out of it.
Or maybe that is the plan anyway....
Well -- you could have had the other option. You could have had the nationalists win. did they unbind women's feet? no. did they insist on a classless soceity? no. would they have provided any hope for a modern state? no.
again -- democracy doesn't work until the democratic norms have been established. I'm not saying the chinese government will necessarily do that -- but i object to anyone preaching the gospel of democracy without first finding a way to establish those norms.
as for tiananmen and the cultural revolution -- both were unfortunate. But you take the bad with the good. Would you rather our founding fathers been rejected because samuel adams tarred and feathered british loyalists and paraded them around? i wouldn't -- i would rather samuel adams hadn't done that, but i know we wouldn't be where we were if we had said, "f*ck that -- i don't want no stinking founding fathers that would tar and feather ppl who disagreed with them."
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Actually, a TRUE martial artist would have made you give up long before it became necessary to come to blows.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
google "Patent Cooperation Treaty" and see that China is a signatory.
Unlike copyright treaties, patent treaties typically do two things: establish a priority date for applying for a patent in one country based on date of applying in another, and allow an inventor to specify multiple countries on a standardized patent application for an additional fee. Question here is whether SGI or MIPS paid that additional fee.
I shot a Glock 21C that did that shit. God that's annoying. The FN Five seveN has a great ejection method, it fires the round forward when ejected, WAY out of your way.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
That is Hundai.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you mean science and engineering infrastructure, then they're already working on it with a vengeance: http://www.dailybrowse.com/index.php?option=com_fr ontpage&Itemid=1
sure -- but i was just trying to illustrate the point. but allowing slavery is in there (some would say worse than death), murduring millions of indians, etc all taint our country's roots.
does china need to improve? absolutely. all i'm saying is that there are constructive ways of change, and self-destructive ways.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
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?
The CPU is 95% MIPS compatible using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of the MIPS architecture,
The AMD chips are 100% Pentium compatible, using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of the Pentium architecture, and we all benefit from that. As long as they don't violate specific patents or copy parts of the circuitry, it's also legal.
If MIPS Technologies actually claim intellectual property in the MIPS instruction set or general aspects of the MIPS architecture, then we have a real problem, but that problem is with MIPS Technologies. Instruction sets and straightforward high-level architectural choices should not be patentable.
and what does this say about the chinese people? they seem to invest great pains in stealing technology rather than creating new ideas. there have been newspaper reports of the chinese taking american cars, reverse engineering them, and then building a chinese version with cheap plastic and parts for nickels on the dollar. and i believe china and tiwan are the two biggest manufacturors of knock-off goods, like pirated gucci bags, or playstation mod chips, or fake rolex watches. too bad we can't kick the RIAA out of the USA and send them to china.
Actually, some of these aren't "Knock offs" per se but actually "surplus" factory output.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The current Party leadership is very corrupt. The only hope to clean that up is democracy, which is why they fear it; ideologically they're hardly communist at all now.
Sorry to put it to you, but democracies (for instance india or the philipines) can be several orders of magnitude more corrupt. Curruption has less to do with the system of government then it does with how entrenched the organizations of powers are.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Patent Law
Trademark Law
Copyright Law
Technology Contract law
Product Quality Law
I fully expect Chinese companies and the Chinese govt. (often the same thing) to steal trade secrets and IP from outsourced operations and then turn around and compete against us using our own technology. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. American companies that outsource their SW / HW development to China are writing their own epitaph.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Your economy is now pwned by the chinese/asians (to a certain exstent so is mine). Most manufactuering is nwo done in china, almost every product imagineable is now either "made in china" or "made in india". Electronics are now rarely made in the USA. My computer almost had 100% taiwanese parts. It's now just a little late to try and reverse this trend, and you can blame all the short sighted MBA's who thought they'd get a great bonus by financing their competition. At the moment the things the US does well is:
1- work hard
2- has good management
3- has good R&D
#1 is a trait shared by India and China. #2 is something that can be stolen with little or no effort. #3 can also be stolen and at some point improved upon as the japanese showed us was possible in the 80's. The US hegemony is almost over, lasting a scant decade and a half. Who do I blame, yeah I blame the stupid buisiness execs.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Ok, this is cool and all, but only really relevant if I can buy one. That would be cool.
... they should call it CORE.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
No, it would still be an increase of one thousand percent.
When something increases x%, it goes up by a factor of the percentage divided by one hundred. When something decreases x%, it is reduced by x parts per hundred. This is common terminology in all manner of fields, economic or statistical.
Speaking of percentage changes made in a population is in fact the non-obvious interpretation, and this is why people usually phrase such descriptions in the form "x went from y percent to z percent".
That is the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in weeks.
to assume that CPU design is an American specialty of some sort.
True, and if one even bothers to look at the different CPU architectures and their history one it's rather plain. Take one of the most widely used architectures like ARM, it's pure British. The strongARM was a cooporation with the old Alpha team so it's partly American. And it's that Indian guy, whats his name? Who is considered the main architect of the SPARC line(Or was it the MIPS? I always mix those up). And in the little simpler segment we have the Atmel AVR family, which was developed in Norway.
First, democracy is necessary to fight corruption (once the clean fire of revolution wears off, all one-part states descend to cronyism or worse), but unfortunately not sufficient. I maintain that China is much more corrupt than any democratic country. In India and the Philippines we hear about the corruption because they have a fairly free press, in China the press is certainly bolder than before, but still very wary to criticise the government or CP; they are subject to reprisals if they irritate. When you hear of CP members being charged with corruption it means they've lost out in some internal power-struggle, not that crusading reporters or judiciary have uncovered them.
Until best and cheapest CPUs are made by China, instead of AMD/Intel. Just like Hondas/Toyotas replaced Buicks.
With the current wisdom of MBA blueshirts, the United States will have to feed itself with Disney cartoons and T-bond paper, since the very basic manufacturing skills are being lost.
Fired from the Shoulder or from the Hip. AFAICT the AK47 was designed primarily for Hip firing where the AR15 was designed for both shoulder and hip firing.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Shoulder.
I too, had a problem with a Glock doing this. Not sure what model, but it was a .45.
I guess PCTalk must believe it's less than a 95% copy of the original, so it didn't bother linking to the story. The original story was developed by Microprocessor Report. Sorry, but we're a paid subscription newsletter, so we can only publish an abstract in the public domain. You can the original abstract at: http://www.in-stat.com/tr/index.asp and follow the link to "China's Emerging Microprocessors"
Don't sweat it, it's only 1's and 0's.
I sympathize with flames more every day. This comment is so much simpler and more elegant that what I probably would've written, and it gets the point across much better. There's no reasoning with the self-absorbed eurotrash on this website, so why even bother? When it comes to assholes like them, it's better to take the tough love approach, except without the love.
How did AMD pay Intel for x86, BTW?
and what does this say about the chinese people? they seem to invest great pains in stealing technology rather than creating new ideas.
You mean like Microsoft?
Or even with Linux, most new ideas are incrimental even when they are revolutionary.
Actually, after reading this article, I doubt that patents are likely at work. China most certainly has an interest in exporting electronics, especially with their own chips. Most of the MIPS architecture is public domain anyways. And the Chinese would be shooting themselves in the foot not to do due dilligence in this regard (IANAL, though).
the anwser for china is to invest in R&D. it is what all advanced nations do.
They most certainly are doing this. Their space program is among the most advanced in the world at the moment. But as I say, most new ideas are built on ideas that came before. That is why the goal of the patent system is to allow everyone to copy technology after the patent holder gets his head-start.
As for counterfit bags, etc. You have to look at real income costs for such things. The Chinese are incredibly brand conscious. (My wife is Chinese-Indonesian.) But as long as it takes too many hours to make enough money to buy a genuine Gucci bag, the cheap knockoffs will continue to be sold in China.
Is this a bad thing for US businesses?
Not necessarily. It means that they already will have substantial brand awareness as they can begin to address this problem.
Is it a bad thing for the Chinese people?
I say it is, but primarily because I see the emphasis on commercialism and brand consciousness as generally unhealthy anyway.
China, BTW, is heavily investing in infrastructure and R&D to support a tech economy. I see this chip just as another step.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
In mixed and capitalist systems the power is not so concentrated. Hence less corruption. Que the greeneys that still don't understand how much smaller GE is then government, also that you can stop dealing with a corrupt company much easier then you can stop dealing with corrupt governemt. The former requires you to be pissed enough to find alternatives the latter requires you to take to the hills with your weapons (you do support the second ammendment don't you?).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
an increase of over 1000% means 10x.
but i'm american -- white american.
but they provided education like no one else would have. you have to give them credit for that. would you rather have the chinese continue under the subjugation of foreign governments like they did for hundreds of years?
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
He didn't say that the rate of literacy went up by 1000%, but that literacy went up by 1000%.
Having one gene for sickle cell is actually an adaptation against malaria. If you targeted sickle cell, you might kill all those people who have one such gene, but not those who have none.
Also, what genetic weakness could you exploit against the Chinese that would not affect the Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc.
The warp tunnels have nothing to do with the game.
Sure they do.. the GLA (terrorist faction) has warp tunnels.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
tell me the corruption in the u.s.
the government is not 'corrupted', it's that some of the leaders doing something other than (outside) their scopes.
you cannot harmonize injustice.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
That wasn't the end of it. Charles Dickens wrote an article (or was it a book?) decrying this sort of practice, and guess what? His article was duly copied, then reprinted and published in the US, as was the norm then. The ironies (there seem to be one or two levels of it)...
I cannot recall this source, could've been Benjamin Franklin by Carl van Doren (looks like the wrong period). You can also google for "charles dickens copyright piracy" for other related events.
First, democracy is necessary to fight corruption (once the clean fire of revolution wears off, all one-part states descend to cronyism or worse), but unfortunately not sufficient. I maintain that China is much more corrupt than any democratic country. In India and the Philippines we hear about the corruption because they have a fairly free press, in China the press is certainly bolder than before, but still very wary to criticise the government or CP; they are subject to reprisals if they irritate. When you hear of CP members being charged with corruption it means they've lost out in some internal power-struggle, not that crusading reporters or judiciary have uncovered them.
You have clearly never visited either country. I have visited 2 of them. Chinese corruption isn't as common as you think. In the philipines, if you have enough money you can do anything. Without it, nothing happens. It took us a bottle of jonny walker blue and a cash bribe to get DSL installed when I was there. While in china, every company operated like their counterparts here but faster. The officials at the borders didn't impede us or try and take bribes. Eveything was by the book.
You mistake Democracy for Pancea. Democracy does not cure everything.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
You wouldn't have the lawsuits if the current laws didn't encourage it.
But, yeah, the problem always comes back to the people. If we didn't drink the kool-aide, Microsoft wouldn't have as big a monopoly, and if we didn't pay them money, they would eventually be unable to continue using the courts to stall, and the worst example of bad IP behavior would go away.
Fewer bad examples to follow wouldn't result in Utopia, but it would result in fewer bad examples followed.
I live in China and have visited the Phillipines a few times. So I'll just ignore you now.
I wasn't comparing it to a CS class, I was comparing it to a Computer Engineering class. I've seen CS majors try to design hardware, and it wasn't pretty most of the time. In Comptuer Engineering, chip design or FPGA design is a lot of what we do.
Granted, it was an oversimplification, but I've seen groups that were a mix of grad students and undergrads crank out hardware designs a hell of a lot more complicated then a CPU and have a fairly good implementation. (Granted, mostly targeting FPGAs. One example I know a lot about was speech processing/reconigition.)
I always prefer to start the year off with a bang - or, to be more precise, a series of loud hums, a crackle or two, and
I live in China and have visited the Phillipines a few times. So I'll just ignore you now.
I've done business in both. China needs a lot less lubrication.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Idiotic comments by brutish Chinese generals notwithstanding.
Oh, please!
If baselessly/hypocritically labelling a country an Axis Of Evil which supports terrorism isn't idiotic then I don't know what is.
A hundred and twenty characters ought to be enough for anyone...
Graduate student projects can often be fairly interesting and impressive, but you very deeply underestimate the work involved here. To put it this way; Academic projects are often very clever in a fundamental way, but commercial designs have year after year of very clever work done on every detail. This is not interesting to academia since it proves nothing about the design as such, it just creates a good end product.
I do recognize this myself though, I am often of a similar opinion about great pieces of software (I am firmly on the software side of things actually, though I have written some VHDL and have a general interest in computer architecture). It is easy to look at the fundamentals and say "the basic workings of this is trivial", but the devil is always in the details.
But, anyway, this story has long since dissappeared from the frontpage, lets get on with out lives.
I have had rather different experiences. Everyone I know says the same thing. My company got screwed over twice, and that's why I got sent to China in the first place - to keep an eye on things and make sure they're done properly. You can do business, but watch them like a freaking hawk. If an American company screws you over, you can take them to court. In China...come on.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
_that's_ a good point. China's legal infrastructure isn't nearly as established as the U.S.'s is.
Which is why (maybe not in this thread, I don't remember) I said that it wasn't about the Chinese people -- it was about the state of development of their economy. The U.S. had just as many "cheats" when were at the same level of development.
I wasn't an English teacher though -- I was a student, and a system's admin, and even a model. But not an English teacher.
I tried VERY hard to embed myself into the culture though. Had a great time -- fell in love with the place. I even earned the honorary title, "zhongguotong."
Where were you located there? What industry?
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?