14 DAY TRIAL // Intel is currently the uncontested leading manufacturer of consumer chips, followed by AMD, which is still far from providing a high-performance competitor for the former’s high-end chips. The Santa Clara-based chip maker has recently entered the low-cost, low-power market, with the release of its highly successful Atom processor. Currently, the only real competitor for the company's netbook-loving Atom CPU comes from VIA with its Nano chip. However, this could change in a more or less distant future, as Chinese researchers are currently trying to develop a new CPU targeted at the low-cost PC market.
Last week, in California, Chinese researchers unveiled details of a microprocessor, which had been in development for quite some time. The chip is codenamed Godson-3 and is part of a project that aims to deliver personal computing to most people in China by 2010. More than 200 researchers from the Institute of Computing Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, are working on its development, with government funding.
According to Zhiwei Xu, deputy director of ICT, China is making a late entry in the chip making industry. “Twenty years ago in China, we didn't support R&D for microprocessors,” he said during the presentation held last week at the Hot Chips conference, in Palo Alto. “The decision makers and [Chinese] IT community have come to realize that CPUs [central processing units] are important.”
Back in 2001, the ICT group began working on a single-core CPU and, by 2002, they had already introduced China's first general-purpose CPU, named Godson-1. In the years that followed, the team made impressive progress introducing faster versions of the Godson-2, the second chip, which was based on the initial design. Zhiwei Xu stated that each new processor raised the performance level by three times. Commercially, the chips are sold under the brand name of Loongson, which translates in “dragon chip.” These chips, manufactured in China by a French-Italian company called ST Microelectronics, already power several server systems and PCs in China.
The Godson-3, which is set to debut in 2009, is the first quad-core chip to be released by the ICT Team. In addition, an 8-core chip is also in development, according to Xu. Both of them use a 65nm process technology but, according to Xu, the chips have the advantage of scalability, which will enable more cores to be added without significantly changing the processor's architecture. Interestingly, the four-core Godsone-3 is said to consume 10 watts of power, while the eight-core version has a 20-watt power consumption. This actually means that the new chips are mainly targeted at entry-level and low-power markets, which is precisely where Intel is getting a lot of attention with its Atom CPU.
However, the latest chip will be significantly different than its predecessors, as they weren't compatible with Intel's x86 architecture. The Godson-3 has been featured with 200 additional instructions to simulate an x86 chip, thus allowing the processor to run more software applications, such as Microsoft's Windows.