Chip challenger: Lemote is one of a handful of companies manufacturing Loongson-powered Netbooks, mostly for the Chinese market.
Credit: Credit: c.j.b / Flickr
Computing
Chinese Chip Closes In on Intel, AMD
China may finally have a processor to power a homegrown supercomputer.
- Thursday, October 21, 2010
- By Christopher Mims
At this year's Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, Weiwu Hu, the lead architect of the "national processor" of China, revealed three new chip designs. One of them could enable China to build a homegrown supercomputer to rank in a prestigious list of the world's fastest machines.
The Loongson processor family (known in China by the name Godson), is now in its sixth generation. The latest designs consist of the one-gigahertz, eight-core Godson 3B, the more powerful 16-core, Godson 3C (with a speed that is currently unknown), and the smaller, lower-power one-gigahertz Godson 2H, intended for netbooks and other mobile devices. The Godson 3B will be commercially available in 2011, as will the Godson 2H, but the Godson 3C won't debut until 2012.
According to Tom Halfhill, industry analyst and editor of Microprocessor Report, the eight-core Godson 3B will still be significantly less powerful than Intel's best chip, the six-core Xeon processor. It will be able to perform roughly 30 percent fewer mathematical calculations per second. Intel's forthcoming Sandy Bridge processor and AMD's Bulldozer processor will widen the gap between chips designed by American companies and the Godson 3B.
However, China's chip-making capabilities are improving quickly. Intel's Xeon processor uses a 32-nanometer process (meaning the smallest components can be formed on this scale), while the Godson 3B uses 65 nanometers, leading to significantly slower processing speeds. But the Godson 3C processor will leapfrog current technology by using a 28-nanometer process, although this will only increase its clock speed by about a factor of two, estimates Halfhill. With its eight additional cores, this should make the 3C about four times as fast as the Godson 3B.
Hu, lead architect of the Godson project, said via e-mail that China's Dawning 6000 supercomputer, originally slated for completion in mid-2010, will instead debut in 2011, using the Godson 3B. Halfhill calculates that the Dawning supercomputer will use CPUs that are slower than fastest Intel chips. However, it could still rank on the Top 500 list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world--a significant coup for China's fledgling electronics industry. "Just getting into the Top 500 with a native processor is a worthy accomplishment," says Halfhill.
The Loongson processor is based on the MIPS instruction set, the basic commands that a microprocessor understands. In contrast, Intel and AMD processors are based on the x86 instruction set. Engineers at China's Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) have added more than 300 instructions to the MIPS instruction set in the latest generation of the Loongson processor, and most are devoted to vector processing, a technique for processing data in parallel that can speed operations like graphics and scientific processing. The Dawning 6000 would mark the first time a MIPS-based supercomputer has appeared in the Top 500 list since 2004.
The ongoing development of the Loongson processor family is good news for Stanford-based MIPS Technologies, which licenses the MIPS instruction set and competes with the x86, ARM, and IBM Power architectures. "It's our view that the ICT team and the MIPS instruction set are in a leading position for the [Chinese] government-driven national processor effort," says Art Swift, vice president of marketing at MIPS.
At the low end of the Godson family of processors, the new 2H chip is an incremental improvement compared to previous chips in the Godson 2 series, says Halfhill. According to Hu, the chip is designed for netbooks, other mobile devices, low-powered PCs and embedded systems.
- 1
- 2
Related Articles
Smart Phones with Intel Chips Debut at CES
Lenovo and Motorola will sell smart phones powered by a new, improved Intel chip later this year.
A New Kind of Microchip
A probability-based processor may speed up flash memory, and eventually much more.
epsi00
5 Comments
- 944 Days Ago
- 10/21/2010
chinese Chip Closes In on Intel, AMD
First we ship manufacturing ( you know the dirty jobs )jobs to China. Then one day we wake up to realize that China is in the processors business and is not shipping back the manufacturing jobs to the US. Time is on China's side unless...
Uber
4 Comments
- 940 Days Ago
- 10/25/2010
Re: chinese Chip Closes In on Intel, AMD
We shipped chip manufacturing business not only to China, but Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc. VIA of Taiwan is also making processors competing with Intel and AMD. I welcome more competition.
devassocx
112 Comments
- 944 Days Ago
- 10/21/2010
This can't be!
Haven't we been told for years by those that know that only Americans are smart enough to do this sort of thing?
You know. Those 3rd world countries are supposed
to make tennis shoes and stuff like that and America does all the high tech stuff.
I wonder what went wrong with that model?
majucamex2010
3 Comments
- 944 Days Ago
- 10/21/2010
What is wrong is that the American Dream is not anymore, third world country?, well the no all USA is silicon valley, there is also a third world country in USA (even worst)
majucamex2010
3 Comments
- 944 Days Ago
- 10/21/2010
Only Americans, do you mean from Alaska, Canada, until Chile?, USA is not America, and most of people who innovated something in "America" was not born there, most of them were immigrants, Einstein, Tesla, and a bunch of them, now that USA is broken those brains are doing big things in other countries.
pkristo
7 Comments
- 942 Days Ago
- 10/23/2010
I think it would be very beneficial for you to go to some high tech plant in the USA (say Intel for instance) and just watch the people entering the building: about half of them will be Indians (not native Americans, but people from India), and the other half (mostly) has Asian angled eyes (probably Chinese). A few percent of them will be Americans, but only a small fraction of them will be engineers - Americans are mostly managers. So I don't know what have you been told and by whoom and when, but it's wake up time.
profquatermass
57 Comments
- 940 Days Ago
- 10/25/2010
Some of us in Europe have never considered America as the frontier of technology...
About time America woke up and realised it isn't the centre of the Universe...
:-)
kevin1986
1 Comment
- 939 Days Ago
- 10/26/2010
That blog is One Hundred percent original content with an impressive range of topics and i would add in my bookmarks.
************
Kevin
diora
1 Comment
- 944 Days Ago
- 10/21/2010
may have another 50 years to wait Chinese processor becomes a product ready for the market. go to China, find whatever laptop you can find in the street, none of these powered by a processor called Loongson. the only names you can find are intel and AMD.
stop making a fuss. nothing changed.
Mapou
357 Comments
- 944 Days Ago
- 10/21/2010
So here we are in the 21st century with the computer industry facing not one but four major crises (parallel programming, reliability/security, productivity and memory bandwidth), and the Chinese think the best way to attack these problems is to design a processor based on last century's failed computing models? How lame.
No new processor architecture will be economically viable in this century unless it solves at least one of the problems I mentioned in the previous paragraph. A multicore processor that is designed from the ground up to solve the parallel programming crisis would be a step in the right direction for the Chinese, in my opinion.
One thing is certain: there will be no long march to victory for the Loongson. A quick stroll to abject failure is more like it.
outcry
2 Comments
- 944 Days Ago
- 10/21/2010
I smell certain sourness:) However, Chinese is marching on...
BTW, the point is not to make Godson commercially successful. Instead, the key work is "national", we want our own and we cherish independence. Chinese market is big enough. Admitted, these is long way for Chinese to catch up. But, a thousand-mile-journey starts with the first step.
Mapou
357 Comments
- 943 Days Ago
- 10/22/2010
There is no sourness in my remarks. The Chinese cherish independence and national greatness and I find no fault in that. However, true independence and greatness come from solving big problems through breakthroughs and innovation. It does not come from copying old and soon to be obsolete technology.
My advice to the Chinese is to pour money into a processor research and development center whose purpose is to solve some of the crises that I mentioned in my previous post. They have the brainpower and the resolve.
outcry
2 Comments
- 942 Days Ago
- 10/23/2010
"My advice to the Chinese is to pour money into a processor research and development center whose purpose is to solve some of the crises that I mentioned in my previous post. They have the brainpower and the resolve."
Your suggestion sounds quite reasonable. However, I hate to break the news to you, high-performance micro-processor technology is on the technology embargo list of US to China. Don't get me wrong, I think US has every right to protect its technology advantage. I am just pointing out that there is a reason for Chinese government to invest on its own micro-processor technology. Another thing I'd like to point out is that copying/mimicking is always the most efficient first step to innovation. I personally attach tremendous value to emulating something. This observation is supposed to be a common sense, but I see so many people missing it.
dglenn
1 Comment
- 943 Days Ago
- 10/22/2010
Remember, every once in a wile, a Revolution is not a bad thing!
vkrmful
13 Comments
- 942 Days Ago
- 10/23/2010
China is a huge economy and market, therefore the copies that are made in China make senseless the investments in big deals. The EU and the USA would have to work on public forums, because China makes a copy of everything within a short time. A global interest is that let researches be reachable immediately for everybody in the future like in Japan are.
mattgroom
290 Comments
- 936 Days Ago
- 10/29/2010
For a long time China have just copied everyone and bought facilties/companies available in every other nation. Why build a mines production facility when they can buy one thats functional and ship it over.
Mapou is correct they could invest further in technology.. but until they catch up you wont see it.
When will they catch up?... good question and they are already in the ballpark about now id say. At a guess they could be the equivalent of America in 1985-90 at the moment.
Theyve probably come to realise that having the latest weaponry is just a drain on R&D resources, easier to let someone else do the work and steal the plans...
This chip is a sign of things to come.
I love the people complaining about the MIPS architecture being old...When in fact the entire silicon architecture is on the verge of a photonic future.
rocket7777
124 Comments
- 933 Days Ago
- 11/01/2010
mips/intel has been around for very long time.
What basically happened is that risc (reduced instruction set computer) became useless when millions of device per cpu were available.
But starting 486 or so, internally all cpus were risc like with decoder.
Then there was simd (single instruction multi-data) extensions. So intel added mms/sse etc. which are kind of parallel computing.
Even then, separate graphics processors were still useful.
Chinese processors are like mips with mms/sse type extension.
All modern super computer uses thousands of cpu. This means that processing per cost and watt is more important. In other word, if chinese cpu cost 1% intel chip and deliver 70% of performance and equivalent wattage. For double the cpu count, faster system can be made with 2% of cpu cost.
And when chinese chip goes to 28nm, chances are it will be 3x current speed and probably about same performance per watt as 28nm intel chips at that time at 5% of cost.
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
skingw
31 Comments
Taiwanese chip maker
>>Historically, China and Taiwan have had chilly political relations even as their economic interdependence has increased.
It's just over-simplification of the background. Taiwanese chip makers have been building the best mainland china chip plants for ten years, and have gained support from the very top of the Chiense government.
Reply