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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."
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
Not really. Low power MIPS64 chips use 10-20W. Low power ARM chips use under 1W. They're both low power within their various domains, but the ARM chips get a lot more performance per Watt. Most of the time, the MIPS chips are more interesting for supercomputing, because they have better floating point, better interconnect (there's a lot of experience floating around building large MIPS systems, a lot from ex-SGI people), better toolchains (MIPS has been in HPC so long that it's a standard target for compiler in that market), and better overall performance.
The ARM chips are interesting because a lot of server tasks are not CPU-bound. You can stick 64 ARM SoCs, each with enough flash and RAM to run a small business server, in a 1U case and not worry about heat. You can connect it to a big SAN for storage of data (just put the OS and apps on the flash). Idle power usage can be a few mW per server, power usage under load is basically the power usage of the SAN - the rest of the hardware is adding 1W or so.
It's a mistake to confuse the server and HPC markets. They have very different requirements.
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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
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++;