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jhinkle
sharps_eng
It makes sense that if China is to make computers that its poorer consumers ...
China's Godson MPU aims for 28-nm
Rick Merritt
8/25/2010 6:40 PM EDT
Also on the road map is the Godson 2H, a single-chip PC processor that integrates graphics, a memory controller and a full suite of peripherals due in late 2011. Hu's group also plans a 16-core server chip for 2012, the Godson 3C.
The Godson paper created a buzz at Hot Chips where Hu was peppered with questions after his talk. However, some--including analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 in a video interview--expressed skepticism whether China could make good on its ambitious plans, particularly for securing 28nm process technology.
The eight-core Godson 3B is in the works at a time when AMD is already shipping a 12-core server chip. Intel described at Hot Chips its Westmere-EX, a 32nm dual-threaded, ten-core server processor with advanced security and virtualization features it will ship soon.
China's CPU engineers plan to leapfrog 45nm process technology, using a 28nm process for their next generation design. Hu optimistically predicted he will have a prototype 28nm Godson design by April, though real products will not be ready until 2012.
However, it's unclear where China will find a 28nm fab. It currently uses STMicro with TSMC as "a second source," Hu said.
TSMC will have 28nm available for key partners such as Xilinx and Altera in 2011, but it's unclear whether a China national project would fab its part in a Taiwanese foundry.
STMicro and China have a long relationship. In the early 1990's ST and the Shenzhen Electronics Group held talks about building an advanced fab in southern China, but the discussions never came to fruition.
The Chinese government has invested as much as US$10 billion in a range of 16 high tech projects in the last five years, said Hu, a member of China's National People's Congress and a professor at ICT. The projects range from China's space program to systems to handle the country's growing water pollution problem, but the brunt of the spending has gone into an initiative to develop a homegrown processor and operating system, he said.
The Godson processor initiative got its start nearly a decade ago in China's 10th Five-Year Plan. The project has met its goal of the current Five-Year Plan--developing a range of CPUs for desktops and servers.
In the next decade--the period of China's 12th and 13th Five-Year Plans--the country aims to build out an ecosystem for the chips.
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rick.merritt
8/25/2010 6:48 PM EDT
What impact do you think Godson will have?
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sylevine
7/4/2011 7:23 PM EDT
Rick is there an email that I and Richard Chow can use to reach you?
Richard is a high school student and wants to do a research paper on grid interconnect computers like Godson and merrygoround interconnect like IBM and Intel.
Also do you know the email URL so that Richard can contact Weiw Hu?
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rick.merritt
8/25/2010 6:50 PM EDT
What impact do you think Godson will have?
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goafrit
8/25/2010 8:48 PM EDT
China is for real and I just hope people will not be migrating to China in my generation. This country is summonsing feat after feat. Whether this chip has any impact or not, it is amazing what this nation has become. Intel is a monster and it is not possible to compete against them. However, if China gets better, the govt will help them prosper. After all, it is a state capitalism. America be better wake up. China is real.
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yalanand
8/25/2010 10:09 PM EDT
I guess if china could compete with biggies like Intel....this is in general good for the industry. I think there are not many companies into CPU designs...but low cost products from these chinese could bring down the prices of the CPU'S drastically.
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resistion
8/26/2010 12:35 AM EDT
Need to wring the Godson through the side-by-side CPU benchmarks, the same ones that AMD and Intel go through.
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jg_
8/26/2010 1:07 AM EDT
Silicon is but one leg of the tripod.
The other two legs are Price, and Software.
Expect the Chinese to be OK on price, but software is a tougher nut to crack.
Hu does seem to be somewhat skirting WinTel, so there could be niche-room for this.
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ManasK.RayChaudhuri
8/31/2010 11:10 PM EDT
I AGREE WHOLLY.STD.CHINESE PRICING WOULD MAKE IT LOW.
OTHER THINGS/CRITERIA TO BE WATCHED WHICH MAY MAKE IT A DOUBTFUL STARTER.
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pixies
8/26/2010 4:37 PM EDT
China has tried multiple times in the past decades to produce its own CPU, as well as operation system, but have never succeeded commercially. There was a national R&D center in the school I have graduated trying to develop a Windows like operation system, they spent more than 10 years and was the biggest line item of the annual department budget but produced absolute no product, more than 80% of the participating members have eventually migrated to the US. The government controlled R&D model simply does not work.
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rick.merritt
8/26/2010 6:23 PM EDT
Pixies: Why do you think that model doesn't work?
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will99878898
8/26/2010 8:29 PM EDT
I believe it's the evil side of human nature. Communism is fairly naive in realizing this compared with other western traditions/religions.
china paid dearly for this ignorance in the past, there have to be some mechanism to filter out more evil/sinful ppl in your org. to make it healthy such as market economy etc.
chinese govt. system use communism which could acts as a semi-religious group to promote human virtues. this system could achive some certain level of success ie. rockets, supercomputer etc.
but this system can't achieve the highest level of human cooperation, so china lags in some key area even after many years of struggle like jet engine etc.
about this cpu I bet it could achieve some level of success, hopefully some of its talents could find a way to form a real company to continue it like lenovo did.
I did know another school (namely peking u.) involved in similar acts years ago and generated lots fanfare. in the end it's just wasting money I guess.
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pixies
8/27/2010 1:47 PM EDT
Rick, at least when I was still in China, that was more than 10 years ago, the person who has enough clout to bring in huge amount of fundings calls all the shots. That person usually was well connected politically, but not necessarily technically savvy. I have involved in grant applications in both China and in the US, the review process in China was a joke, at least back then. The other team members had no role in deciding what to do and how to do it, and innovation spirit was largely suppressed because the big boss wanted all the credits.
China has improved dramatically in almost all aspects since. but the fundamental issue remain, on a grand scale it is not a meritorious society. Connection is everything. The Asian system, including China, Japan, and Korea, is good for catching up but not for leading, because once the goals are set, usually set by the US, all you need to do is organize a huge group of engineers to work toward it, which they know are solvable and the solutions can be looked up and copied from publications and, nowadays, on the internet. When I was in school, we were trained to focus on prove theorems that have been proven by ancient Greeks or 17th century Europeans, but not on how to work an open-ended problem. This is true to the entire Asia, not necessarily limited to China.
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pixies
8/27/2010 2:04 PM EDT
Will, I partly agree with you but I do not think it can all be blamed on the communist nature of the government, the Soviets had a much more repressive regime and they were relatively successful at science, at least they generated a few Nobel Prize winners. I think it has more to do with the culture. Taiwan and Korea have similar culture to China's, but they are much smaller in size, and the students returned from the West can make much larger impact to the society.
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saomiao
8/27/2010 6:58 PM EDT
I took a look at Godson II chip spec in the web. The package design is totally of out whack on the EM issue, resulting less than 300MHZ ddr interface.
The chip physical design method is P&R and resulting large die and low performance, high production cost. Nobody designs high end cpu using P&R. The only reason to do this is to get result fast and get more money from the government.
The godson team may be able to design cpu which funcationally work. But they can not produce anything profitable within 5 years. The team is not technically prepared for it.
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KB3001
8/27/2010 7:51 PM EDT
That was not the case hundreds of years ago when China led the way in innovation. It is only normal that after 200 years or so of stagnation, innovation and free enterprise stalled. However, you have to learn to read well before you can start to write. I believe China to be on the road to be a leader in innovation. Whether this processor proves to be a market hit or not remains to be seen, but it is an effort in the right direction.
Wrt your comment on grant application processes in China vs. US, the system that you describe (I would call it feudal) is also normal at this stage. With time, the cream will always rise to the top. As long as the Government goals are focused and well resourced, the system will improve its efficiency with time. On the way, setbacks will surely happen and money will be squandered, but that's part of the process....
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peter236
8/30/2010 11:19 PM EDT
I don't agree at all. In the case of China, they started their economic development late, compared with the US, Japan, Korea or Taiwan province. What China needs is time. It is just a matter of time before they catch with Intel, and Intel will be in some stiff competition when that happens. Once China's economy reaches fully developed status, we expect that it will an lead the world in at least some areas of technology.
As China's economy grows, its culture is also changing rapidly. You seem to be fixated in the past, but you need to be prepared for drastic changes in China. If the past 30 yrs of Chinese economic growth was impressive, the next 30 yrs will be even more so.
You would imagine that developing a CPU is time-consuming and capital intensive and no private company can do it. So the government has to do it. Clearly, for the Chinese, it is very important for them to stay closely behind Intel technologically.
It would be nice if each Chinese student can buy a laptop with a Chinese CPU inside rather than a Intel CPU. That will save them a lot of money.
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Neo1
8/27/2010 2:10 AM EDT
This putting together multiple core has become a fashionable feat these days. Do we really believe that creating a cpu with out of order instruction execution is all it takes to make it big? No, even though this is good as a research project it won't matter much commercially because of obvious reasons and intel is not in any danger from these efforts.
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will99878898
8/27/2010 4:06 AM EDT
I agree this cpu will not pose any threat to intel etc.
best case is someone ll invest a company to utilize all the knowhows and end up with sth like huawei etc. which is challenging/beating lucent recently.
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SkyhighSG
8/27/2010 4:01 PM EDT
Let's be subjective and avoid political talks.
I dislike capitalism in the USA and communism in China. Either way is corrupted anyway...
Unless Intel makes many wrong moves and loses focus to position itself at the heart of its niche sector to fend off any competitor, China will certainly pose a threat, if and only if Chinese competitor(s) can safeguard its patents, core design expertise, production cost, consumer confidence in its branding.
More and more Chinese companies made its presence felt globally. Huawei, Legend, SMIC etc are making their way to the Tier 1 league. Their capitals are growing. Just China domestic market and economic regeneration is sufficient to spin the cycles, without export to USA.
More and more designers/engineers in American MNCs are Chinese. Less and lesser are American and Canadian, largely due to engineering is a lack luster as a career, compared to banking and other professionals. Look at the top US colleges, more and more are Chinese professors.
Every year, China can produce 400k engineering graduates. On the contrary, Germany, Japan and USA are falling in numbers.
With USA imposing strong protectionism and arrogant on global stage, it is in certain times USA will lose its shine. American need to re-think beyond technology and reflect upon morals and respect for other countries.
Being a superpower is more than just winning technological edge. With Hillary continues to anger more countries with her "airhead" remarks, that will further backfire American attempts to increase economic yields and definitely semiconductor sales.
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SkyhighSG
8/27/2010 4:04 PM EDT
BTW, Russia is considering to ban 90nm imports to support its Russian entreprises.
Indirectly affecting USA in a significant magnitude.
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jg_
8/27/2010 5:20 PM EDT
The Russian move, is merely a request from a highly self-interested player, and it is doomed to fail. You cannot ban multiple process flows, using a single number, and the biggest irony is, Russia is getting the know-how from ST!!
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DataMuncher
8/27/2010 10:45 PM EDT
Let's avoid the jingoistic tripe about countries. We should be welcoming Godson to the world stage, since anybody that's involved knows that it takes a world of talent to design and build a commercially viable world class processor. Let's look at some of the leaders
Intel - Designed in Israel, fabbed in US
Qualcomm - US-based company building a UK-based processor (ARM) SoC using a design team in India, fabbing in Taiwan
AMD - Designed in US or Canada (GPU), fabbed in Dresden Germany or Taiwan
Godson - Designed in China, based on a US-based instruction set architecture (MIPS), fabbed in France ?
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CLiHsing
8/28/2010 8:57 PM EDT
Like its older versions, the new Godson will see no success outside of supercomputers and maybe workstations. It will remain a niche product. Besides hardware, you need software applications ported to the processor and that is where the platform is lacking.
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rick.merritt
8/28/2010 9:51 PM EDT
Skyhigh and JG: What's the Russian fab that's seeking the 90nm ban?
CLiHsing: Hu told me his next big focus is developing the software ecosystem.
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bbcallpzx
8/29/2010 9:39 PM EDT
pixies: do you know the asian system had lead the world for thousands of years? why you think if they catch up with the others, they couldn't lead the others.
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http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/poconoarmchairreview
8/30/2010 12:52 AM EDT
Technical specifications are not the only criteria for adoption of a new product. Deals often also depend on social and political settings, as well. How is Mr. Wei-wu Hu at karaoke?
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Janja
11/9/2010 6:00 AM EST
Hello. Does anybody know anything about Godson's vector unit? I have only found information about its size, and I'm interested about its data work.
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Lirmy
4/21/2011 6:51 AM EDT
For the fourth time this year China's central bank announced Sunday the biggest Chinese banks must hold greater cash reserves. China's financial leaders are struggling to keep inflation in check. A world addicted to cheap manufactured goods from China could possibly be in for a shock. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, pandering for a presidential bid, proposed a 25 percent tariff on Chinese imports that was roundly ridiculed by economists. I read this here:[url=http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2011/04/18/china-inflation-threatens-global-growth]China struggles to curb inflation that threatens global growth[/url]
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sylevine
7/4/2011 7:26 PM EDT
Rick is there an email that I and Richard Chow can use to reach you? Richard is a high school student and wants to do a research paper on grid interconnect computers like Godson and merrygoround interconnect like IBM and Intel. Also do you know the email URL so that Richard can contact Weiw Hu?
sylevine1@sbcglobal.net
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sharps_eng
4/24/2012 4:31 PM EDT
It makes sense that if China is to make computers that its poorer consumers could afford then they need to avoid costly Western products.
This is happening with 'unconnected', standalone products in certain markets, but not yet fully with products that demand a connected ecosystem like CPUs.
But with device-independent technologies like Java there is less need for a standard architecture, and they can go it alone.
I wonder what their attitude is to IP, if their eventual new processor needs features that breach other's IP? Will they tough it out, or bend to international pressure to do the right thing, or will national pride force them to do a clean-room design that they can claim as their own?
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jhinkle
5/18/2012 12:44 PM EDT
a 464V core! Wow, that is high-powered! ;)
Sorry for adding another very scientific comment to the high-brow discourse here.
Interesting that it's MIPS-based.. It would be helpful to learn more about how they decided on the architecture and how they got where they are now.
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