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China Switching To Home-Grown Chips For Supercomputers
rubycodez writes "The Tianhe-1A system will be the last Chinese supercomputer to use imported Intel and AMD processors. By years end, China's own 64 bit MIPS-compatible 65nm 8-core 1GHz version of the Godsen (Longsoon family) processors will be used, including 10,000 of them for the 'Dawning 6000' supercomputer. Yes, the chips can and usually do run GNU/Linux, but also can run FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD."
I wish they weren't pissed of by somewhere else which imposed its own tactics for world domination (ie. order) now and in past.
I am not sure if I should be worried of relieved now that we get Chinese instead of American spying equipment inside our processors.
Probably correct. The 19th century belonged to Europe, 20th to North America, and 21st to Asia. History keep changing, but considering that the population of Asia is so large and that China does not really rely on superstitions a Chinese hegemony may last longer than any based on European/Middle East traditions.
That's silly. They're trying to build a supercomputer out of MIPS chips. That'll never work...
Speaking of which, it does make me wonder about all this fuss over 64 bit ARM chips for datacentres. There are already high performance, low power 64 bit MIPS chips and have been for years. They're well proven, have good compiler support, cheaply licensable, low power (perhaps not quite as los as ARM?), have standard 64 bit modes and so on.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That sounds like a good thing. These guys actualy make stuff instead of trolling the world with ever more batshit insane *CTA treaties.
... very trustworthy. 10,000 not-yet-fabricated CPUs are going to be powering a 1 petaflop supercomputer in less than a year? Color me skeptical. ... and anyone want to fill me in why 10,000 8-core MIPS chips at 1ghz can be expected to outperform 12,000 12-core x86 chips at 2.1ghz?
As a Chinese American, I'm glad to see China using their own technology, but it's hardly any sign of world domination, especially when the Chinese chips aren't anywhere close to Nehalem, Fusion, or Sandy Bridge. China has already forced Microsoft to hand over the source code to Windows previously, and being aware of exactly what you're getting from a foreign company or agency is a wise move for any developing nation. Remember the big debate over the NSA_KEY variable a while back?
Besides, when it comes to spying, I would take Mossad over Intel or AMD anyday.
The processor family is called Loongson and not "LongSoon" as summary says. But the typo is funny in its own way.
China does not really rely on superstitions
Have you seen Chinese medicine?
Stick Men
Compare Chinese medicin with "speaking in tongues", as seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZbQBajYnEc
China's own 64 bit MIPS-compatible 65nm 8-core 1GHz version of the Godsen (Longsoon family) processors
I don't think this one will overrun the world wide chip markets anytime soon, Intel and AMD chips are a bit more advanced.
C - the footgun of programming languages
All peoples are filled with superstitions. Just not always the same ones. The Chinese have oodles of 'em.
I wonder how well these chips compare to the R16000's?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The Japanese 10 petaflops-scale K computer in Kobe uses Sparc-compatible cpus from Fujitsu. Sounds like a good idea if you want to build know-how, not just a machine.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
you are completely wrong. this processor has over 200 x86 emulation instructions, allowing it to run x86 code with only a 30% performance penalty, under qemu. it also has two 256-bit vector pipelines that provide SIMD floating-point operations so powerful that a single 1ghz core can do 1080p at over 100 frames a second. to claim that "it will never work" in the face of evidence that you simply haven't looked at is ridiculous. look up the specifications on the GS464V, please. also, you are not aware that the Chinese Government has purchased 25% of MIPS, and is working with the MIPS teams in the U.S. to create this processor. this processor *IS* MIPS's high-performance, low-power 64-bit MIPS chip.
the article has missed out some important information, which is that they are planning two versions of the CPU. the first is a Quad-Core 65nm, and the second is a 16-core 28nm, which will use the same amount of power (about 12-15 watts). hopefully they will also do a Single-Core 28nm which would be under 1 watt, because at 1ghz the SIMD units are so powerful they can do 1080p at 100 frames per second. really, this CPU design is a game-changer. i've been advocating their use for some time - http://lkcl.net/laptop.html
Taking a snapshot of where the Longsoon is now and comparing against where AMD and Intel are now is flawed. The processor business chases moving targets, rather than comparing single samples you need to look at a longer history to try to estimate the rate of change.
Intel started 30 years ago. The Longsoon project started 9 years ago. In that time they have closed the gap on Intel to about 3 years. This 65nm design is comparable with something from about 2007 (the clock speed is lower but having 8 cores helps a lot). The real question is where they will go next.
If they meet their stated plan they are going to skip the 45nm node and make the Longsoon 3B on a 28nm process. They are aiming at a higher clockspeed, more cores and a large integrated vector co-processor that would rival Fusion or Larabee. If they can do what they claim then they are in the process of overtaking Intel and AMD now and we will see the effects on the world processor market over the next five years.
Whether or not they can do this is a big question, and according to the stories in the press it caused quite a debate at HotChips when they announced these plans. It's not clear who will be licensing them a 28nm fab, or quite how they've packed that much into a design. It's not clear how AMD and Intel will respond to a new competitor with state backed funding and a huge protected market.
The next five years will be interesting times...
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when was the last time you been in a KMart, Target, Walmart or [insert BigBox store name here] you cant swing a dead cat by the tail without knocking something off the shelves that doesnt have a "Made in China" label on it, China has basically killed the rest of the world's economies with the poorly designed and cheaply manufactured products...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKv6RcXa2UI
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Taking a snapshot of where the Longsoon is now and comparing against where AMD and Intel are now is flawed. The processor business chases moving targets, rather than comparing single samples you need to look at a longer history to try to estimate the rate of change.
I'm sorry, but it's ridiculous to think that because Longsoon starts today at 1GHz, that they will be able to accelerate faster than Intel and eventually overtake them. The rate of change has got nothing to do with the starting point. A 1GHz MIPS core is easy to make by today's standards, so it just doesn't mean anything.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
just playing devil's advocate.
the fact is that up to about a hundred and fifty years ago or less, the chinese (and japanese) lived healthier and longer lives than europeans and americans (on average).
and nowadays chinese traditional medicine is being adapted by europeans and americans. my mother (medic, general practitioner) learned to practice acupuncture in the 1980s, and she uses it regularly. she told me several times that the religious stuff behind it is kind of stupid, but the technique works for a series of problems.
I am however aware that research into acupuncture didn't see a difference between acupuncture and sticking needles at random (so it might just be placebo). But I'm convinced it deserves some further research, because something is happening to these patients.
Regarding the GPs comment: as far as I know, going to a point where China is a superpower with the most advanced technology on Earth would simply be a return to the natural order of things... But I would like their views on human rights to change before they get very powerful.
new sig
You make a good point. One of the tragedies of the US is our frontier and pioneering spirit. (Not that other people and countries don't have the exact same thing. But the US just happens to be the biggest right now.) We do the hard work of inventing a lot of things, the hard work of refining the processes. And then other countries and peoples learn from our mistakes and do "better" than we did at it.
Of course, it would probably have been a lot harder for the Chinese if some Intel or AMD partner hadn't sold their fab plant to the Chinese.
I'm not complaining- I'd still rather be in the US. But it is galling to hear people make comparisons that just don't work. It is easy to improve upon something that someone has already been busting their asses on. This doesn't make the Chinese "better" (nor does inventing it first make the US better). It's just a different thing.
At work the other day, someone was pounding their head against the wall trying to figure out why their computer wouldn't read a DVD. Hours. They ask me what I think might be wrong. "Maybe the disk is corrupted?" Sure enough, the disk was (functionally) blank. They effused and groveled at my "genius". Fuck no. They did all the other things, I just identified (guessed) at the thing they didn't try.
Also, the pioneers get the arrows and the settlers get the land. Beware!
Maybe so but I'd love to see the planning meeting.
Engineer 1: Lets build a 64 bit 1Ghz CPU.
Engineer 2: Then lets build a supercomputer out of 10,000 of them.
Marketing: 10,000 CPUs.. hmm.. Lets call it the Darwin 6,000!.
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It would be nice for the US to be off the hook for all the evils in the world. Let China be the caretaker of the world for a while and catch all the heat and pay the bills. Then it will be Australia's turn.
Dude, easy with the negatives.
you cant swing a dead cat by the tail without knocking something off the shelves that doesnt have a "Made in China" label on it
That means, if you swing a dead cat by the tail, you always knock something off the shelves that is made someplace other than China. That's not what you wanted to say, is it?
China has basically killed the rest of the world's economies with the poorly designed and cheaply manufactured products...
It's what you do when you're a good capitalist: Drive the competition out of the market by making things cheaper so that you still make a profit while undercutting the competition. Increase margins when everybody depends on you.
Perfect example. If they will be using the supercomputer to run Windows and watch 1080p torrents.
Intel and AMD are hampered by having to provide legacy compatibility, MIPS is a much newer designed architecture that should impose less bottlenecks on processor advancement.
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The Chinese are no different from any other people. The production rule of "good, fast, cheap: pick two" applies to them just as much as anywhere else. Their cheap is just cheaper than most other places. The US and Japan are all about quality control and just in time production methods, because labor is expensive. In fact, it is SO expensive that we can't even be bothered to send a QC team over there to make sure they are following the instructions. The Chinese, on the other hand, make their products by the ISO container-full. As long as there is oil to power the ships across the Pacific, they will be fine. Oh, wait.
China has basically killed the rest of the world's economies with the poorly designed and cheaply manufactured products...
Or you could place the blame where it lies: With retailers who will lie to you with marketing about the quality of a shit product, and with consumers who lap up the shit gladly instead of doing some research to find a quality product. China would sell us quality goods if we refused to purchase their crap.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would like to buy a small (perhaps 1U) server based on these chips if such a thing exists...
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Yes, it's amazing how fast the chinese can reverse engineer old technology! Good thing there are strong copy-protection laws in force to prevent this sort of thing.
All snark aside, this does point out something very important; The Chinese can never surpass the performance of the people they're copying. On the other hand, they can price them right out of the market. The down side (for the entrenched powers) with the world going multicore is that you can solve problems by just throwing more cores at them. Granted, there are plenty of problems which can't be solved in this way, but even a really crappy CPU core of today is shockingly impressive by Ye Olde Tyme standards. When I think about the difference between my old Sun 4/260 and the cute little netbook on my lap with the 1.2 GHz 64 bit processor and the 2GB of ram, which is a kiddie class machine by modern standards, it makes my mouth a little dry.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Im also very interested in the future and i suspect the Gap will close pretty quickly between AMD/Intel and Longsoon. Mostly because AMD/Intel has hit a brick wall if you look at per core performance. But, will there be software other than Linux supporting the Longsoon, or will China adopt some Linux version all over?
China dumping Windows would really be something spectacular and throw a big wrench into intelligence gathering from abroad.
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The Chinese are no different from any other people.
The idea that we are all the same is as ridiculous as the idea that we are all different; that is, we are all similar, but we are all different.
As long as there is oil to power the ships across the Pacific, they will be fine. Oh, wait.
China has a shitload of land and can do whatever it wants because the people are different and will knuckle under to anything. Witness their damn dam, one of the worst manmade environmental debacles of history. How many people did that displace? China could go into biofuel-from-algae and probably will if big oil loses much power. (Collectively, Big Oil is more powerful than China today, see if they aren't.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
it also has two 256-bit vector pipelines that provide SIMD floating-point operations so powerful that a single 1ghz core can do 1080p at over 100 frames a second.
In these modern times, if you are going to be doing lots of SIMD on your HPC, you will replace the 10,000 CPU's with 500 GPU's + 500 CPU's to drive them.
Its cheaper to buy, and cheaper to operate.
"His name was James Damore."
We do the hard work of inventing a lot of things, the hard work of refining the processes. And then other countries and peoples learn from our mistakes and do "better" than we did at it.
And all of mankind benefits. Too bad so many people are stuck in the "us and them" mindset.
c++;
A 1990s Toyota is "easy" to make today, but if China starts making them in bulk then Toyota wouldn't be happy.
In a world where slightly outdated chips are "good enough", and the marginal cost of making them is probably a few bucks, I'd be very worried if a really big competitor was breathing down my neck.
It would be commercially suicidal to try and undercut AMD, because a price war would leave no profits for either competitor. So even if it's "easy" to start a price war, nobody wants one. Unless, of course, they happen to be a very large country, that would like to buttress their national accounts by driving down the price of chips.
Chip manufacturers are near monopolies, who invest their profits into research. Great. But chip design is becoming one of those problems that doesn't *really* need solving. Incremental upgrades will be nice, and I'm sure that there will still be some innovation, but many people would rather have slower innovation and cheaper parts than expensive parts and faster innovation.
Yes, because the chinese are stupid and they don't have any engineers.
What the hell are you people on? Can't you see the clear patterns? China began exactly like every other nation: first they copy, then the invent, then they lead. Compare with Japan. In the 60ies, you spoke of "cheap japanese copies". Then they took over, now you have Toyota and Sony.
Do you really really believe that a 5000 year old civilization with nearly 1.5 billion people, the highest average IQ in the world and lead by engineers, won't figure out how to design a CPU? What will it take for you to wake up?
c++;
Those who have been treated by real Chinese medicine, as opposed to the snake oil imitations, would beg to differ. Sure, it's not more advanced than modern western medicine, but it's not based on superstition at all.
Western "medicine" was no better until a few decades ago. And even today many health problems are still treated along the lines of "we don't know how to treat this, so take this pill as it seems to work on 20% of the patients, um.... unless it's placebo".
Don't quote me on this.
They are obviously refering to the age of the earth.
c++;
they use the MIPS based, as its derived from a GPL version of the MIPS technology
so they can produce it without patent problems
but DEC made the Alpha CPU GPL before DEC got eaten by compaq so that should be free to use also
infact some of the alpha tec like programable microcode was incoparated into the p4 released after that
the Alpha cpu would be a better architecture to base a system around
other than i have not seen a free download softcore for the Alpha cpu yet (although not looked for some time )
Chinese vs Western is irrelevant.
There is scientific/evidence-based medicine, and then there is everything else.
Its cheaper to buy, and cheaper to operate.
And performance dies screaming at the first branch instruction. Yes, GPUs have great throughput, but they suck for large categories of algorithm. If they didn't, then CPUs would have the same performance. They generally lack any branch prediction, so a branch can stall the pipeline completely - if you've got more than one branch every hundred instructions, running it on the GPU won't give you anything like the theoretical maximum throughput. If your threads aren't exactly in lockstep (i.e. if two threads take different branches), say goodbye to performance too. CPUs have been heavily optimised with caches because most algorithms have a lot of locality of reference. GPUs haven't - they assume algorithms that stream large amounts of data without revisiting any of it.
In short, a MIPS CPU with a wide vector unit is going to have very different performance characteristics to a GPU and will be significantly faster for large categories of algorithm.
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Learning to make cheap crap is more than halfway to learning to make valuable crap.
Which part sounded like a propagation of the Mhz myth? Was it the bit where I said that a lower clock-speed was offset by a larger number of cores.... oh wait a minute, that would be the exact opposite...
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The Japanese elite *may* have outlived the European/American elite but I'm gonna [citation needed] you on that one... The Japanese common man, however, certainly did NOT live longer or better than his Western counterpart.
I refer you to "Standard of Living in Japan Before Industrialization: From what Level did Japan Begin? A Comment" by Yasukichi Yasuba in The Journal of Economic History Vol. 46, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 217-224.
Yasuba takes to task the notion that life for the commoner in Japan was better than that in the West. While economic development HAD been ongoing throughout the Tokugawa shogunate, and circumstances had improved for the Japanese laborer, the reality of the situation is that farmers here and farmers there both were treated very poorly. He also points out, specifically, the flaw in Hanley's research (which estimated life expectancy to be around 40 years in Japan) specifically used a source which excluded year 0 deaths, and then substituted Western infant mortality rates in its place. At the time, Japan would be much closer to India than the West. By using data which matches temple records more closely, Yasuba suggests that the actual life expectancy of the time was around 35, which (again) puts it below the West.
present day... present time... hahahaha...
we are all different.
I'm not.
The problem is that the they have an "us and them" mindset.
How much of Longsoon's success is made possible only because Intel and AMD wrote the book on processors?
What does that matter?
Whoa there, watch the straw men.
You said it yourself; the Chinese have been doing this processor business for about 9 years, while Intel has been doing it for about 30. What on earth makes you think that the people with 3x the experience are stupider? If a veteran company such as Intel can make terrible mistakes like FDIV or the more recent Sandy Bridge recall, what makes you think some relative noobs won't make such mistakes?
At least in the US, when Intel gets nailed, we hear about it in the press. Do you think the repressive Chinese government would let the media know that their country's national processor has a flaw?
:(){
Australia hasn't got enough people or engineers.
Rocket Surgeon.
The part where you go off about the speed of the parts and the die size, without considering such things as the experience of the designers in avoiding inevitable bugs.
:(){
maybe 6000 is Darwin's IQ.
Rocket Surgeon.
"one of those problems that doesn't *really* need solving"
I would argue that it desperately needs solving. Current computer chips are power hungry monsters that have so many legacy systems that not old eat up die real-estate which adds cost but also eat up power.
Data centers are becoming hot spots for resource usage, sucking in amazing amounts of electricity. One day, data centers will rival high rise office buildings and industrial plants in how much polution they are responsible, and that day is coming quickly.
I'm sure they do have very smart engineers.
I've not got a faith in their manufacturing processes however. I realise this isn't an entirely fair comparison, but I've heard horror stories about the motorbikes that have been coming out of China. For example a friend of mine bought one and was going through batteries like they were made of water. Turns out the alternator was generating 16v which will boil 12v batteries. The British Office of Fair Trading has seen a 100% rise in recent times of complaints about Chinese made goods.
Lets hope the same manufacturing processes aren't used in their chip manufacture.
It's one thing to copy someone else's successful designs, and a whole different thing to make your own.
:(){
China doesn't have *CTA-like proposals because they're not the current forerunners, they have no ip innovations to protect and actually much to gain from violating ip laws. If ever China becomes the pioneering nation in a tech field, rest assured they will press their own ip protection proposals on the rest of the world.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Your reasoning is impeccable, but I can't begin to count the number of times market forces, amortizing massive investments over huge economies of scale, have trumped common sense.
What's interesting here is how differently China plays this game. They're focused on long-term national prestige and influence, so they can tolerate being a few years behind by specifying the use of domestic products. That ensures the cash flow their enterprises need to catch up. That would. be unthinkable in the US, with the. exception of a few companies like Boeing, and. even then it's ideologically incorrect to be up front. about helping the chosen enterprise. The standard position is that the competitor kettle is blackened by government favoritism.
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A 1990s Toyota is "easy" to make today, but if China starts making them in bulk then Toyota wouldn't be happy.
In a world where slightly outdated chips are "good enough", and the marginal cost of making them is probably a few bucks, I'd be very worried if a really big competitor was breathing down my neck.
...
Bingo! The U.S. lost its consumer electronics industry to Japan in the 1970s because U.S. manufacturers were not concerned with low cost competition on the low end of the market. The low end is always pretty big and massive sales makes massive revenues and massive production; massive production and revenue perfect the industrial processes and leads to superior design and production technology; superior technology extinguishes competition who focuses only on the "high end". The low end will move up and cannibalize the high end market.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
That really sounds like the Mhz myth to you? Do you even know what the Mhz myth is?
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I don't think there will be a Chinese hegemony in the way there's been an American hegemony where the average Chinese will be much richer than the average American. The labor market has become far more fluent, once you hit some minimum standard of education, technology and political stability the jobs flow, both the "IP economy" jobs and manufacturing jobs because shipping is a relatively small part of the cost.
While there's a different stretch between the workers and the capitalists, I think the differences between workers internationally will diminish. Those that are below average like China and India will come up, those that are above average like the US and Europe will come down. While there's been an awful lot of crap code coming from outsourced development they are working up experience and improving their education and training, there's no reason your typical Indian teenager starting out today should do worse than your typical American teenager. The days where you got a huge advantage just for being born in the US is over, the green card is no longer winning the lottery.
To be honest, even though it may suck for us I think it might be good for the world in the long term. I see it in a "mini"-format here in Europe, anyone from an EU state can apply for work here in Norway and vice versa. While there are some cultural issues to work with, it really lowers economic and nationalist tensions, if you don't like it just move to where the jobs and money is, no need to start a damn war or anything.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
China could go into biofuel-from-algae and probably will if big oil loses much power.
They could likely go Soylent Oil, if they gave up the one-child-per-family law. (I am being modest.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
It's not that the person with more experience is dumber but that they have different priorities or have backed themselves into a corner. For instance with cars again. It's not that Americans can't design equal or superior cars it's just that they made something well that eventually became expensive and useless for many people and when they decided to start doing what Japan was doing that meant they were the ones in new territory and it was Japan that had more experience even if the US had more experience with cars in general.
If China makes a CPU that performs as well or nearly as well but it, for instance, uses a fraction of the energy then you may find a lot of data centres jumping on board. Would Intel or AMD be able to do the same in time? Maybe but it may also mean creating a line of CPUs that aren't compatible with existing systems and Windows. It would have to do well in the same market because they couldn't recoupe the cost elsewhere or they'd also have to build something on top to allow for legacy support which can make them more expensive.
That will put them at a disadvantage even if they're as smart or smarter than their Chinese counterparts.
And performance dies screaming at the first branch instruction.
You cant do separate branching *at all* between the multiple scalers within a SIMD vector. All the scalers have the same operations performed on them.
You seem to be confused about why the negative performance of branching matters on GPU's... its not because it impacts their SIMD capabilities.. because it doesnt.. its because it impacts their CPU-like "GPGPU" capabilities... which means... what I said is 100% correct:
If you are doing heavy SIMD work, get a pile of GPU's.
"His name was James Damore."
Intel and AMD are hampered by having to provide legacy compatibility, MIPS is a much newer designed architecture that should impose less bottlenecks on processor advancement.
Motorola and IBM said the same thing about PowerPC when they started. Over the following years the PowerPC got about 20-40% better performance at the same clock rate as the contemporary Pentium, SMP also had a similar performance advantage. However Intel was able to win with actual performance by achieving higher clock rates.
Also recent Intel x86 architectures have a modern RISC design. The x86 instruction set is merely a facade. The x86 instructions are translated to "micro-ops" that run natively on the RISC core. Intel is free to change/replace this core at any time.
Things are a bit more complicated than they appear.
You cant do separate branching *at all* between the multiple scalers within a SIMD vector. All the scalers have the same operations performed on them.
No, but you can do branching between each set of operations. If you're doing a matrix operation, then you can do a couple of SIMD operation on a row, then a branch based on the result. This is pretty fast on most CPUs, it's painfully slow on a GPU.
You seem to be confused about why the negative performance of branching matters on GPU's.
No, I'm not. One of the things I work on is a GPGPU compiler for HPC, so I'm intimately familiar with their strengths and weaknesses and when it makes sense to offload work to them from the CPU.
its not because it impacts their SIMD capabilities.. because it doesnt.. its because it impacts their CPU-like "GPGPU" capabilities... which means... what I said is 100% correct
I never said it did. I said that it affects their ability to handle instruction streams containing branches. A typical instruction stream coming from a piece of C code has a branch, on average, every 7 instructions. If you're doing vector operations on a scalar unit, then this may be every 20 instructions or so, but closer to 7 if you're using vector intrinsics. It needs to be over about 200 before you start to see the GPU being faster (and even that's highly dependent on other factors, including data independence and memory layout).
If you are doing heavy SIMD work, get a pile of GPU's.
Still not true. If you are doing highly parallel (SIMD or MIMD) work that has little locality of reference, predictable data access patterns, and very predictable code flow, get a GPU. If not, your CPU is likely to be faster. A GPU is not just a very fast SIMD unit, it's a processor that is insanely heavily optimised for a relatively narrow class of algorithms. The set of (useful) algorithms that benefit from SIMD is much larger than the set of (useful) algorithms that can run efficiently on a GPU.
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They are obviously refering to the age of the earth.
Nope, they are expecting to achieve 2/3rds of the performance of a HAL 9000.
They still haven't figured out how to implement a sane government... in 5000 years.
How long did it take the US? Oh that's right.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
A 1990s Toyota is "easy" to make today, but if China starts making them in bulk then Toyota wouldn't be happy.
In a world where slightly outdated chips are "good enough", and the marginal cost of making them is probably a few bucks, I'd be very worried if a really big competitor was breathing down my neck.
It would be commercially suicidal to try and undercut AMD, because a price war would leave no profits for either competitor. So even if it's "easy" to start a price war, nobody wants one. Unless, of course, they happen to be a very large country, that would like to buttress their national accounts by driving down the price of chips.
Chip manufacturers are near monopolies, who invest their profits into research. Great. But chip design is becoming one of those problems that doesn't *really* need solving. Incremental upgrades will be nice, and I'm sure that there will still be some innovation, but many people would rather have slower innovation and cheaper parts than expensive parts and faster innovation.
I was under the impression that CPUs generally had fairly large profit margins. A price war might be exactly what China would want. Especially since these days China seems interested in world wide prestige for their firms and might back them with there very deep pockets.
Shatner?
Facebook is the new AOL
and with consumers who lap up the shit gladly instead of doing some research to find a quality product.
Honestly, isn't quality just as negotiable as price? Let's say I can buy a "quality" lawn mower that is serviceable and with good parts availability for $300, and there is a piece of garbage Chinese lawnmower that is not serviceable for $100. I have to decide whether or not that good lawnmower is going to last 3x longer than the Chinese lawnmower, and whether the cost of labor/parts when it does break is going to approach the cost of a brand-new Chinese lawnmower.
Extend this argument to 99 cent strings of Christmas lights and $1 wine glasses, and it is clear that people aren't just "lapping up the shit" without some very good reason.
Now, I'm a stubborn old mule and so I still buy quality stuff much of the time - but I can hardly argue that I'm being sensible financially. I just don't like cheap shit! :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
China indeed appears to be led by engineers rather than lawyers (maybe being a champion debater or orator isn't that useful in a single party state). As for "highest average IQ", I doubt that China's average IQ score would be much higher than the US since China has a greater base, where low scorers could pull down national average.
Results of my casual googling has turned up lists topped by countries in north-east Asia that include Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, countries whose average income per person is much higher than China's (which can imply, among other things, better nutrition and education).
Agreed. My claim is that people do practice Chinese medicine in a scientific/evidence-based way, although admittedly fraudsters selling snake-oil are easier to find.
For example, as far as I understand it, there is active scientific research on extracting the active ingredients of many herbs used in Chinese medicine. (traditionally they are simmered in pots until the resulting liquid becomes concentrated, which becomes the medicine to be drinked)
Don't quote me on this.
There, fixed it fer ya.
Yeah, they're totally going to dominate us with their ancient 65nm, slow chips in a slow ass supercomputer that hasn't even been built yet.
No, but you can do branching between each set of operations. If you're doing a matrix operation, then you can do a couple of SIMD operation on a row, then a branch based on the result. This is pretty fast on most CPUs, it's painfully slow on a GPU.
You are doing it wrong. The branching is only one of your issues. You are preventing coalesced reads, as well as causing bank conflicts in shared memory.
What you are describing is effectively "gimped" from the start. You have a single matrix but want to leverage instructions which operate on multiple data. Sure, the matrix is made up of multiple data.. but what you should be doing is operating on many matrices (hundreds.. thousands even) at the same time... Certainly you know the difference between AoS (Array of Structures), SoA (Structure of Arrays), and SoAoS (Structure of Arrays of Structures)
If you cannot do this, then performance isnt really the concern that you are making it out to be (I don't care how big the matrix is.)
"His name was James Damore."
My apologies for two bad typos, though I typed both in correctly in tags, also wrote Godsen for article text not Godson.
The Loongson 2E & 2F processors have flaws, but it's not like the Chinese is hiding anything.
One of the flaws is this one, and there is a software workaround for it: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338405
As I have seen thus far, China is working openly with the open source projects to get their changes upstream into the Linux Kernel, glibc & tools, and other applications.
I even have a port of Open Grid Scheduler (Grid Engine fork, a batch scheduler for HPC clusters) for Loongson:
http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/
Wow, you really have no clue. If your problems are that loosely coupled, then you don't need to do SIMD at all, just solve each matrix in a separate process on separate CPU. For typical applications where supercomputers are used the problem is to solve a single, huge problem, not a gazillion small ones. That is when parallelism becomes hard, otherwise you don't need a supercomputer at all.
I'm sure these are very nice chips, but anyone can do similar, given funding. there are a number of cores available for licensing (like they did with MIPS), and adding vector units is the obvious way to boost your peak flops without blowing your power budget. I guess I don't really see why this merits all the coverage - for instance, what fraction of peak performance can it get on real code (say, a weather or MD simulation, not HPL)?
the quoted peak gflops/watt for this project are decent, but not much better than current commodity x86 parts, and comparable to GPUs. most architects in the field consider power-efficient computing to be a system-architecture challenge: how to move around all that data without spending all your power on fast/wide buses. a genuinely interesting new architecture would try to address this - perhaps something vaguely like IRAM. smart memory with some kind of high-order interconnect seems like the way to go, rather than putting giant vector units on a traditional design.
Shatner?
No, but close: posting from a mobile phone.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"low power" quad-core 65nm 1ghz MIPS64 chips use 10 watts; 90nm, 20 watts. if you go to 28nm and stay at 1ghz, you divide by four - so that's 10/4 = 2.5 watts.
also, there are two different configurations for 65nm done by TSMC: one is high-performance (lower cost, 20 masks) and the other is lower-power (slightly higher cost, 32 masks). the lower-power CMOS one was only invented recently, so this is why you often see e.g. Broadcom Network / Server MIPS64 Quad-Core 1ghz 65nm CPUs consuming 10-20 watts. with the mask charges (NREs) being measured in $millions and the verification as well it's not justifiable financially to do a conversion of these older ICs to the newer lower-power fab process.
so there are a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration. also you have to bear in mind that speed is a trade-off against latency. ARM SoCs are typically done in low-power, high-latency configurations, whilst the Chinese ICT University want to go for high performance (without busting the building's water-cooling when you have 1,000 of the 16-processor chips in the same room) so they can get that number one slot for the world's fastest supercomputer.
They could likely go Soylent Oil, if they gave up the one-child-per-family law. (I am being modest.)
I see what you Proposed there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I can't begin to count the number of times market forces, amortizing massive investments over huge economies of scale, have trumped common sense.
In a command sector of a mixed economy, such as this sector is, the government can absorb the massive investment costs and can effectively ignore "market forces" that you mention. Once the companies designing and fabbing the chips are strong/advanced enough, they can be unleashed upon the world as a very strong competitor. This is one of the advantages of having an actual industrial policy. Sadly, the free-market religion being adhered to by the US these days cannot fathom any way that this might actually work and, as such, disallows any such governmental "interference".
I expect our chip-design and manufacturing leadership to be lost to China in 5-10 years. Maybe this will start people thinking that the free market is not a panacea. But it's OK because the free market gives us the freedom to lose. Sort of like the homeless people wandering around your downtown who say they like living on the streets better than "getting help". Yes, we Americans love our myths...
That is all.
The exact argument was made for Japan, as its rate of improvement in manufacturing was staggering in the late 80s and early 90s.
Please cite examples of entire countries that have won from the country's industrial policy? You can find some individual industry successes, but not entire countries, I think.
Laws and regulations are programming for an open environment. A conceptual oxymoron that nobody associated with technology should fall into. Nobody tries to write a handbook for living their life, we all know that our worlds are too complex to allow a finite set of rules to deal with it. Yet, most people seem to think the gov is part of such a simple world.
Empirically, it is pretty clear that laws are written by entities with $ who will be affected by the law, and that all regulatory bodies are quickly taken over by the regulatees. Money buys power, every time.
Even if programming for an open environment were possible, the parallel is hackers vs programmers : Programmers for any given program are few, the tools are flawed. Hackers are many, inevitably some of them find the flaws left by programmers + tools. Hackers have a permanent advantage. Lawyers writing laws/regulations are few, tools are nil, lawyers on the opposite side looking for loopholes are many.
So, laws and regulations of the very specific type, at least, do not and cannot work. We have to give up that model of government.
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
A 30% performance penalty running the x86 version compared to the native version of the same code. See Godson-3: A Scalable Multicore RISC Processor with x86 Emulation.
Be relentless!
past claims of chinese indigenous cpus have been nothing short of blatant scams. it's seriously a national shame. so count me a skeptic on this mips processor.
...Chips for supercomputers, but are still importing Doritos from the US for their LAN parties.
it's not that they're 32-bit or 64-bit that's so important, it's that until the Cortex A9, you couldn't use ECC RAM. also, with only 32-bit memory addressing, and with peripherals memory-mapped, many ARM SoCs simply can't do more than 1gb RAM (and many Cortex A9s can't do more than 2gb). then, also, there is the lack of virtualisation, which, again, has only been corrected in the Cortex A9 design.
you are completely wrong.
Do you really think it's possible to know about 64 bit MIPS and not know about (e.g.) SGI origin systems? You might need to reset your humour filter.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Not because of anything tech or truly /. related but I am a Detroit native and this is no different than saying we will no longer use Honda's. Honda factories are here in the US just like Intel and AMD are in China. Maybe even worse since there is a good chance the manufacturing processes were Intel inspired unlike the fact that Honda has an assembly line.
...now compare that with Western countries where the political leadership is dominated by lawyers.
I wish our government was dominated by lawyers... then maybe we could hammer out some decent laws given enough time. Unfortunately, what we have are businessmen masquerading as lawyers, for whom laws are merely means to a much more important end: short-term profits.
It's one thing to copy someone else's successful designs, and a whole different thing to make your own.
True, but as any number of self-taught programmers can tell you, the two are hardly mutually exclusive, and largely irrelevant to future production.
128 GFLOPS. Four of the cores are or were planed as G-strera co-processors with high floating point performance. And it's trying to do it in a 20W package. MIPS is also without interlocked pipelines and this provides some performance boost as well. Of course these chips were orignially planed for the end of last year.
They don't believe they actually have their own plant, but contract out all of their fabrication/
Extend this argument to 99 cent strings of Christmas lights and $1 wine glasses, and it is clear that people aren't just "lapping up the shit" without some very good reason.
There are some things it makes sense to buy cheap, like razor blades or as you say, wine glasses. There are some things where that doesn't make sense, like christmas lights; buy the LED ones and never have to go to the store to buy more of that shit again. One dollar christmas lights are made with slave labor, now THAT is the holiday spirit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Does having control over fabrication and design mean that they can, at source, include useful features like backdoors, rootkits, etc. In short, processors easily remotely co-opted by the government for citizen monitoring, espionage, and conducting cyberwarfare.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
"It still needs another decade before China-made chips meet the needs of the domestic market. Hopefully after two decades, we will be able to sell our China-made CPUs to the US just like we are selling clothes and shoes."
All of these companies that work inside of China are only slitting their throats.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Omg this had me laughing so hard. Thankyou. I was so confused as to why dots were showing up in the sentences.
Plenty of good arguments so far, but I think China's primary goal in this is neither money nor prestige. I think it is a version of "national security", where the Chinese are trying to create an independent computer industry so they don't have to rely on western technology with possible back doors and kill switches.
C - the footgun of programming languages
It may happen eventually, but it requires the rise of some new device category or "killer application" that cannot be handled well by x86 chips and Windows.
We got close with netbooks, where the price of Windows made enough of a difference to matter and Vista was too heavyweight to run well on this device category. Short term, Microsoft managed to counter this one with an extra cheap "starter edition" of XP. Meanwhile, cheap RAM and Windows 7 being faster than Vista made things easier for Microsoft.
IMHO, the next hurdle for Windows/x86 will be tablet PCs. Not so much because of computing power or Windows prices, but because of the user interface, especially in applications. That takes a lot of redesigning, because applications that require much typing are definitely not fun to use on a tablet. This makes a lot of older applications unattractive for tablets, which means the advantage of Windows having lots of existing software is much smaller on a tablet.
C - the footgun of programming languages
While working for the German subsidiary of a US company (being German myself), I got the impression that management was more interested in quick solutions and new things than gradual improvement of existing technology. If this is typical for US companies, it may be the downside of the frontier and pioneering spirit:
Once a technology works reasonably well, people lose interest in refining it. Which allows other, more patient competitors to catch up and eventually become better.
Asians seem to be the other extreme:
Not so good at inventing new stuff, but very tenacious at improving it.
C - the footgun of programming languages
What makes you think that the LED lights are assembled by different people or with different quality? LEDs just cost more and use less energy. You can tell they use crappy materials by the way they flicker. Why put in a real power supply when it saves a few cents?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You can tell they use crappy materials by the way they flicker. Why put in a real power supply when it saves a few cents?
You can tell they're not idiots by the way they flicker, why put in a "real" power supply when the LEDs last longer and put out plenty of light for their purpose when you let them pulse?
The LED lights are priced with more profit which reduces the chance they're made with slave labor; just as important, you only have to buy them once.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
+1, Reference :)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I've undergone accupuncture treatment for various ailments, and I can attest that it works. During accupuncture, you feel very relaxed and afterwords there is a great feeling of "high" from natural opiates produced in the body.
Why it works is not fully understood by rational studies have shown the effects on the brain using MRI scans. I agree that all those "energy points" and stuff is a load of nonsense, but there is an effect, even if the cause is not known.
Before I had accupuncture the first time I made it perfectly clear that I don't believe in mumbo-jumbo and I like my medicine to be evidence-based. My therapist agreed.
Stick Men
The LED lights are priced with more profit which reduces the chance they're made with slave labor; just as important, you only have to buy them once.
Do you really think they don't maximize profits by reducing manufacturing costs? What makes you think that Phillips suddenly changes factory wages just because they make more per string?
Anyway, they need to last 6x longer than a regular string. Money has a time value, and since I usually get about 2 years out of a cheap set, I'm not willing to make a 12-year investment!
And I think the flickering looks terrible.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
China was going to put "home-grown" CPUs in their PCs. They could never catch up to Intel's efficiencies, especially when their home-grown CPUs were identical photocopies of Intel's chip designs.