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A Chinese Challenge To Intel
motang writes "Chinese government funded Godson-3 a CPU that is developed to bring personal computing to majority of Chinese people by the year 2010. Will this pose any threat to Intel?"
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I'm not an expert but I would guess that a shift to Chinese made chips will be harder on the environment since Chinese pollution laws are generally more lax. Also, if it is pushed by the government, I'm sure they're willing to overlook things. I believe corruption is rife in the People's Republic of China. This is very bad for Intel (and probably AMD, why not?) since there will be a much more cheaply made multi-core CPU available on the market.
Great for the end consumer, however. Possibly even really really good for me as a United States citizen as Intel/AMD will be forced to drop prices to compete in the world market.
Also, there's the 'patriotic' view of this and the fact that the U.S. owes China dearly as a trade partner. Import import import import and export nothing. This would be further propagating that, thus hurting the dollar a tiny bit more.
Oh well, such are the intricacies of world economics.
My work here is dung.
At least nobody said it was a threat to AMD.
Wouldn't the term "Chinese Intel" be an oxymoron.
-- Would this CPU be 16 years old or 14?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
I wonder why they are working on making this CPU x86-compatible. If they want to be really "free" from the western IT-world they don't have to care about running Windows, and when they don't have to care about that, they can just adopt gcc, the rest of GNU and Linux to run natively on their own instruction set.
c++;
"Godson"... The new Jesus chip?
According to the article, "Federal laws also prohibit the export of state-of-the-art microprocessors from the United States to China, meaning that microchips shipped to China are usually a few generations behind the newest ones in the West." Thus, a native Chinese microprocessor project does not need to be state-of-the-art. It just has to be good enough to compete with the older stuff from Intel and AMD. Once the Chinese build up their own knowledge base in microprocessor design, then nationalism and Communism will help foist it upon their populace as they demand computers. It'll be interesting to see how this dovetails with any effort to create Red Flag Linux to move away from the Wintel-opoly.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
This is very bad for Intel (and probably AMD, why not?) since there will be a much more cheaply made multi-core CPU available on the market.
I guess we'll see about that. I did find, however, the best quote ever from TFA
"The decision makers and [Chinese] IT community have come to realize that CPUs [central processing units] are important."
Um...yeah.
You'll have that sometimes...
It's gonna have to be x86-compatible to run all those counterfeit copies of Windows.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Can it run Linux? ;)
I think this will be interesting to watch. It's not like this is the very first challenger to Intel's market. So far none have really succeeded (AMD being the exception, but they aren't exactly considered the czar of the processor world at the moment) aside from niche markets. My guess is that this will be another company that will find its niche and settle for it. Intel just always seems to avoid losing "King of the Hill" status time and time again.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Transmeta has tried, Godson has already tried, and both have yet to make a dent. It's just another knockoff that will not take off.
Like a lot of things from China, reliability will be suspect, not to mention any willful patent infringement.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Maybe now the Chinese will stop trying to hack my servers because they're already inside.
Most of the stuff on
Should it be told to return 16, it will return 16 even if the result is 14. Consider it the Olympic Calculation Extension.
Attempting to write Tibet, Democracy, or anything the PRC deems harmful(via microcode updates) destroys the unit.
(Oxymoron (Score:-1, Troll))
Hrm. I guess the mods have a defective sense of humor here. ...3...2...1...
Supporters of China incoming in
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Hardly balanced but China needs the U.S. as bad as the U.S. needs China. This alone will probably keep the peace.
Why does China need the US again? I must have forgotten.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Four or five years ago there was all this buzz about the Chinese Dragon CPU (based on the old Soviet Elbrus) that was going to combine with Red Flag Linux to destroy Wintel. Heard from them recently? The CPU fanboys don't understand that it's not about designing chips; it's about designing chips you can then make.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The U.S. is China's largest buyer. They wouldn't be where they are without all that money flowing that way. If China were to collapse the U.S. economy which is something they could do right now then they would lose a lot of business devastating their own economy in the process. This nearly happened to the U.S. when Japan's market collapsed.
hello.c:
./hello
--
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
char* msg = "Tibet Free!";
printf(msg);
}
--
$ gcc hello.c
$
Segmentation fault.
$
It seems the next logical step for them will be to develop a Chinese-grown OS and "strongly frown upon" use of Windows at home. (While at the same time having their OS support Windows apps) That way they can have the OS report any "dangerous behavior" by default, and roll out any patches or refresh a new "blocking list" daily....
The funny thing is that they're made in China by a Swiss company, then rebranded Chinese. Ya'd think that they'd want to do it the other way around.
So you mean... Made in Switzerland by a Chinese company, then re-branded Swiss?
Asian language pedantry: Sayonara is Japanese. You're looking for Zai Jian. 再 見
Also, they are being manufactured by ST Microelectronics, which is a French/Italian company (French + Italian = Swiss?).
This isn't quite "re-branding" either... The Chinese designed the chips, but since the developers do not have semiconductor fabs of their own (a very expensive investment), they contract out the actual manufacturing. This is very common for companies to do; companies like IBM or TSMC will manufacture chips designed by other companies but it's not considered a re-branding.
Actually, from the article, I think this is the dragon cpu (dragonchip in the article)
/not suck/.
And it is being produced.
It also makes the VIA processors look like incredible speed demons.
So the problem isn't being able to make them, but being able to make them
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Even in real (before Gorbachov) communist era, USSR was shipping 8086 compatible chips as far as I searched.
Guess what? They care about Windows, DirectX and millions of x86 centric developers. China has always been a realistic country and even Russia couldn't dare to ship a non x86 small chip. Their mainframes were also DEC/S360 etc. clones. There is even a DEC chip saying "Steal from the best" when looked under electron microscope ;)
Indeed there was: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
Hardly. The US exports $1.15 trillion of goods and services per year. It's true that the US imports $700bln more than it exports. Exports recently rose sharply when the dollar's value was relatively depressed versus European and Asian currencies.
If China would more aggressively re-circulate the $1.5 trillion in reserves it's holding rather than hoarding dollars, the dollar's value would fall relative to the Yuan (which is being artificially under-valued, which China can due to its massive currency reserves). This would make Chinese imports more expensive and US exports less expensive. But then, China's export-driven economy wouldn't be growing at an insane 11% per year.
The current trade imbalance is as much China's "fault" as it is the US'. Maybe things aren't so unilaterally bad. There's some truth in the old saying that "if you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $1 million, the bank has a problem."
You jest, but I would be strongly suspect of buying hardware like this. Given such an opportunity to put in a hardware backdoor into every PC with such a chip, do you really think the PRC would pass?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Off-topic xenophobia here but:
Is there anyone else who is a little worried about this scenario:
There's a major decline in the economies of the first world democratic capitalist societies. The global business and banking communities notice that they're making more profit in the authoritarian society, and they apply their influence to see appropriate changes here. The developing world then gets incouraged toward more democratic and humane forms of social organization?
Is anyone else worried that this is already happening?
I don't think the Chinese are worse than most people in the world. I just think they have a scary form of government that is becoming more and more influential and not really getting more humane or free as their economy matures. It's dangerous for the world to learn that you can make piles of money without freedom.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
This is the third major redesign of the Dragon chip. If you had read the article (haha, slashdot joke etc) you would have seen that apparently with each update they've tripled the performance, or so they say. There's been about 8 updates for the second major design of the chip, they're on 2G or 2H now, with integrated GPUs, and even integrated chipsets (System on Chip).
Godson-3 / Dragon-3 chip will have 4 cores at 5W/core (allegedly) and interface using HyperTransport to a chipset (so they can probably use any compatible chipset from the PC world).
Any MIPS or ARM at a given price point will run cooler and faster than x86. All x86 processors are RISC with an instruction converter front end, but that's still enough of a liability to make the first sentence true.
From what little I know about this... apparently the x86 instruction format is more compressed - reducing the overall code size. There's a tradeoff on getting code to the processor and efficient execution. If you're executing faster than memory is being copied, then you'll benefit from reduced code size. I believe that's the current situation, allowing x86 to hold its own (do better) than any other architecture.
There's a strange irony to this, because during the 90s, everyone believed that RISC would cream existing x86 chips. What was not accounted for, was that x86 chips would be RISC, with an instruction converter - and the cost of having the convertor is compensated by a more compressed instruction format.
End game: Netbooks with ARM or MIPS spread upward to desktops and servers with ARM or MIPS. x86 finally fades away of software that doesn't care. All hail.
Champaign and Cheers! Actually, I like my x86 processor, except I wish they were big-endian. Just a small thing.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Taiwan is a big chip maker. I wonder how much of this is an attempt to undermine one of Taiwan's important sources of economic strength. Also, this has a double bonus for imperialism in that making the world less dependent on Taiwan's chip production will make other countries less concerned about Taiwan's fate. A free trade agreement with Taiwan would sure be a big help for democracy and against modern day imperialism.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Yes, that has been the way of things for many years, and is one of the major historical sources of US wealth... they trade their money for other countries goods, then the other country uses them as a world currency to trade for oil with a third party country.
Thing is, they're all bad cheques. It's like if I paid the butcher with a bad cheque and took his meat, then he paid the baker with my cheque, then he paid the candlestick maker with my cheque. The candlestick maker, he put it in his wall safe for a rainy day.
It's great for me, I get all my shit for free. And as long as no one tries to cash the cheques I write, no one notices that I'm ripping everyone off.
Iraq started breaking stride with the other oil producing nations and allowing Euros to be traded instead of US Dollars. Then they got invaded, and that put a stop to that.
I wonder if the US has the military capacity to stop a second nation from breaking stride? I don't think so, but we'll see.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Transmeta has tried, Godson has already tried, and both have yet to make a dent. It's just another knockoff that will not take off.
Like a lot of things from China, reliability will be suspect, not to mention any willful patent infringement.
Unlike either of those two, they don't have the backing of a government will over a billion people in it. If they only make a CPU that's an ARM clone to run their cell phones and something that is slightly more robust than a Barbie PC, then I'd call it success if they manage to rollout a few hundred million of them to the chinese public.
Intel will lose if they can't make hyper super cheap computers for China. I don't know if the chinese can do that, but they've got more incentive to do it than intel does. Intel can just play in their current market while these unknown cheap chinese folks come out of now where and it 10, 20, 30 years have e $1-5 chip that is just as fast as Intel's latest.
I thought that was Iran that allowed Euros to buy oil. Also that was after Iraq was invaded.
>Iraq started breaking stride with the other oil producing nations and allowing Euros to be traded instead of US Dollars. Then they got invaded, and that put a stop to that.
That sounds bad for Iran since they did that too some months ago.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUSBLA02024820080430
Iran conducts all crude trade in euro, yen
Waiter! There's holes in my rice!
Great, even the Chinese are taking marketing tips from intel now.
Since the Arpanet/Internet was born?
You know, I heard that precise same argument around 1970 ... only that time it was about Japan. "All they can do is copy.", "They can make anything out of used beer cans...but all they make is cheap shit".
How do you feel about Japan these days?
Which country is doing the most in robotics?
(P.S.: I'm not certain that the answer to the second question is Japan, but they're definitely one of the top three.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Actually the Israeli guessed the frequency of their radars (well, they measured it), then used a station based in Lebanon to send out a very powerfull pulse on that frequency.
"Hacking" certainly. Backdoor ? No. Just limits of the technology.
Actually there's a thing that both CPU and OS fanboys fail to understand: it's the apps that matter, silly. The hardware and even OS are just a necessary evil to run that software.
The problem is having _software_ for it which doesn't suck, covers enough of the problem space, etc.
The Dragon CPU doesn't have an Intel-compatible ISA, so it doesn't automatically inherit all the Intel-only apps. It's based on the (unlicensed) Mips III ISA. The lack of a license is also why they don't advertise it as such.
But the cavalier attitude to IP is also what will bite them in the arse. When both are free as in, you can get them burned on a blank for (next to nothing), there isn't all that much reason to go with Linux ports instead of buying Windows and Office. Both do the same thing, but one of them has all the years of FUD behind it, and apparent incentives like "but everyone else uses Word and Excel, what if they send me something that doesn't work well in OOo?" or "but maybe if I learn to use Word, I can find a better job where they use that" or "but will I be able to play the latest pirated games on that?" (Even the "run them in Wine" doesn't exactly work on a non-intel architecture, because, as the recursive acronym goes, "Wine Is Not an Emulator.")
I've been saying it for a long time: piracy isn't some grand revenge against the big foreign corporations. Piracy only serves to kill the cheaper, but good enough, alternatives. If the choice were "do I buy AutoCAD for the equivalent of 6 years of Chinese average wage, or get a local alternative for 1% of that" (or even a F/OSS one) the choice might be very different than when both are free (as in stolen beer;) The big foreign corporation, regardless of what BSA tells you, hasn't actually lost anything there. That Chinese kid making some graphics for a mod wouldn't have paid thousands of dollars on AutoCAD, because he doesn't have those thousands of dollars anyway. But he might have been more interested in some alternatives which may have less features, but are cheap and local, or outright free. Piracy only serves to kill those possible alternatives.
And I'm not saying that as a personal rant against piracy, but because I believe that it's one reason why the Dragon will be stillborn no matter how good the silicon is. When the question comes, "but does this local Dragon computer run all that new pirated software?", the Dragon loses anyway.
And China has already had a similar experiment with their own DVD-alternative. Regardess of what other merits or disadvantages it may have, it just can't compete with something which plays all those thousands of pirated Hollywood DVDs. When you don't pay the DVD license "tax" anyway because you pirate those movies (or buy them from a counterfeiter which doesn't), the lack of those royalties on the local brewed codec becomes irrelevant.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes. They're being included in low-end computers, set-top boxes, and supercomputers, all over China. Such as the Tianhua GX-1C.
The Dragon chips (and variations of) are also gaining some traction in Europe and the US, being used in a couple dirt-cheap $250 EEE PC clones. eg.: http://www.compsource.com/pn/3KRZ40074GB/3k_Computers_2340/
http://www.gdium.com/description/
They've made millions of them.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm not worried, and my country is a lot closer to China than the US or Europe. In fact, I think many Asians welcome a strong China which will allow us to play China against the US to curry favours, just like we did during the Cold War. See here, the way I see it, there is no difference in principle between so-called democratic capitalist governments and communist governments. The only difference is the method of choice that they use to screw you. Unlike China, the US has developed far enough to no longer needing to use a bullet to the back of the head (Guantanamo aside) to keep the populace in line but instead uses an arguably far more devastating method: litigation and obtuse laws. To a citizen of a capitalistic society, there is nothing more deadly than being sued to bankruptcy. Also, I wonder who was the first person to come up with this theory of capitalism = democracy? This is utter crock. Throughout history, capitalistic societies are sometimes the worst there is. The Roman Empire is probably the ultimate example of this, fueling its economy by invading, pillaging and enslaving everyone. It is no surprise then that China is turning out not as a clone of the US.
Large Hadron Collider. From holes in cheese to holes in the universe
So as a quick answer to your question, no TSMC does not manufacture anything in North America. They do most everything in XinZhu Science Park in the center of Taiwan.
As to the Godson. This was an intriguing story about eight years ago but at this point it's quite literally academic. The project is maintained as a pet research project to encourage students to learn processor design, but it is in no way a threat to Intel or AMD or Nvidia or Via or even any of the dozens if not hundreds of ARM 11 microprocessor vendors. The reason this is so is simple --money.
Processor intellectual property has been almost completely worthless for years now. Look at the netbook phenomena with Intel's Atom platform and the rise of the ARM 11 systems with Ghz clock speeds and insanely frugal power consumption that go into smart phones and media players as well as netbooks. These are devices that are going to be mass-market retailed in the low hundreds of dollars and quickly heading for sub one hundred dollar territory. It's a race to the bottom. There's not much room for processor technology to pay off at those price points after you pay for the LCD, the Li+ battery, the wireless radios, the chip fabrication and assembly. It doesn't matter if it's China, Russia, Venezuela, India, Canada or France. Developing a new CPU design at this point is first and foremost an exercise in bragging rights that will threaten none of the existing players who basically give up the circuit designs for a few pennies per unit.