Chinese start-up readies 64-bit processor

[CitizenOfWorld]

Chinese start-up readies 64-bit processor

By Mike Clendenin
EE Times
March 05, 2003 (8:22 AM EST)

BEIJING — Stay tuned: China's first homegrown CPU is about to go 64-bit.


One of the country's most promising start-ups, BLX IC Design Corp., Ltd., told EE Times Wednesday (March 5) that it is closing in on a 500-MHz microprocessor that it will market toward China's leading server vendors, including Legend Group and Dawning Technology. It would eventually be positioned as the engine of a distributed grid computing network that will be used by public and private firms here.


The chip is dubbed Godson-2 and is the follow-on to a 32-bit, 266-MHz version released last year that is aimed at the embedded systems market. Both chips are largely based on the MIPS instruction set, but are not fully compatible because they avoid the use of key instructions that would run afoul of MIPS patents.


BLX has moved quickly to rally Chinese industry support around the architecture, launching an alliance that intends to attract 100 members and create 100 designs within two years. "We already have 60 companies and 15 designs so we are ahead of schedule," said David Shen, chief executive of BLX. "We have started working with Haier, which is the biggest consumer manufacturer in China, and they need a lot of chips."


All of the 60 companies that have joined are Chinese firms, Shen said, and they range from upstream hardware makers, to consumer giants like Haier, and software providers Red Flag Linux and Great Wall Software Co.


Godson-2, which has also been translated into English as Dragon or Longxin, has already been prototyped. Samples are expected to roll in the first half of next year. The chip will be binary backward compatible to the 32-bit Godson-1, a path of compatibility also chosen by Advanced Micro Devices in development of its Opteron line.


Some of the improvements over Godson-1 include a four-issue super-scaler architecture, dynamic branch prediction and a non-blocking cache design to allow for multiple misses in the memory array. The chip will probably be made on a 0.18-micron process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., although Shanghai's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. is also being considered.


Planning for Godson-3



Even though Godson-2 hasn't been officially rolled out, researchers at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a government research group that first designed the Godson architecture before licensing it to BLX, are already thinking about a Godson-3. The core design will be similar. But more features should improve its standing.


"By the end of next year, we hope we can add in multiprocessor support and on-chip secondary cache. If these features are added, the power consumption may be around 10 watts," said Tang Zhimin, a senior ICT engineer who headed up the Godson project. The power budget for Godson-2 is around 5 watts, based on a 1.8V core and 3.3V I/O.


Also under consideration are SIMD for multimedia processing and multithreading support. "We are also looking at how to integrate multithreading with our current superscalar architecture," Tang said.

[CitizenOfWorld]

China: The Next Microprocessor Giant?
By: Robert Richmond
Date: 3/7/2003 Views: 3030


Even as tech spending slows and corporate profits slump in the United States, China is moving forward with pumping billions of dollars into its rapidly expanding semiconductor industry. Since 1991 China has built 53 new high-technology industrial centers and witnessed over 22 billion dollars worth of new tech trade, providing nearly a 60% sustainable growth in tech marketing as compared to just ten years earlier. At current rates, Chinese economists expect sustained growth of atleast 20% a year, especially with the recent announcement of a new microprocessor core being marketed under the "Dragon Chip" development program.

While the name of the project has changed over past couple of years, the current generation of the Dragon microprocessor core is known within international markets as "Godson." The first Godson processor rolled out in the last half of 2002 and generated great amounts of speculation and interest from all sectors of the semiconductor industry. The Godson-1 is considered to be China's first internally engineered design, and is built atop a proprietary core with support for the popular RISC-based MIPS instruction set.

Godson-I


Godson-I Microprocessor
Instruction Set "MIPS-like"
Integer Processing Unit 32-bit
Floating-Point Unit 64-bit
Operational Frequency 266 MHz
Front Side Bus Frequency 50 - 100 MHz
Transistor Count 4,000,000
L1 Cache Size 16 Kilobytes
Core Die Size 0.18-micron

The Dragon architecture is being marketed as a generally compatible "MIPS-like" solution, as the China Academy of Science (CAS) has licensed the GS instruction set from MIPS Technolgies, Inc. Interestingy, though, China chose to implement a completely independant and proprietary core architecture. MIPS systems are RISC in nature, thus a variety of popular POSIX-compliant operating systems can be easily ported for operation with the Godson. Companies associated with the CAS microprocessor project are opting for a custom Linux implementation built atop the version 2.4 kernel core.

Godson-II Microprocessor
Instruction Set "MIPS-like"
Integer Processing Unit 64-bit
Floating-Point Unit 64-bit
Operational Frequency 500 MHz
Power Consumption 5 Watts
Core Voltage 1.8 Volts
I/O Voltage 3.3 Volts
Core Die Size 0.18-micron

This week's debut of the Godson-II has ushered in much media attention for China's fledgling microprocessor industry. The announcement is nearly a full year ahead of schedule, as original CAS roadmaps indicated early 2004 as the official launch date of this impressive little chip. The GS-2 picks up where the original left off; with vastly improved frequency scaling, true 64-bit instruction support, and a revamped core layout. Perhaps the most important feature of this new is the significantly reduced power consumption numbers. At less than 5 watts for the 500 MHz model, the GS-2 is perhaps the lowest power 64-bit MIPS processor to date!

Godson-III

Chinese engineers are already hard at work on the next evolution of the Godson platform. Godson-3 is expected to introduce even more features and is anticipated to be a large success in server markets. GS-3 will introduce multi-processor support, an on-chip secondary cache, improved frequency scaling, extremely low power demands, and possibly a new streaming multimedia instruction set. Many analysts seem to think the GS-3 will start silicon sampling in late 2004, though if the GS-2 is any example, expect an announcement of availability sometime in the next 6 to 12 months assuming no major roadblocks exist.

Additional Computing Projects

Think that the Godson is impressive for a startup project? China is working furiously to shift billions of dollars in financing to its high tech industries. Announced in December of last year, the Ark II 32-bit microprocessor is ready for deployment within consumer arenas. The A2 will be a mass production chip operating at 400 MHz and is designed around an integrated approach. The core includes features routines for networking, sound, and even a smart card interface. While performance is pathetically slow according to current US standards, the Ark project is working hard to establish a low-cost computing system for the Chinese masses.

On the supercomputer side of the equation, the LSSC-II Massive Computer System made its debut last August with much fanfare from Chinese corporations and universities. The system is capable of impressive performance numbers, as it weighed in at number 24 on the world's top 500 supercomputer list upon release. CAS is currently using LSSC-II to perform testing of fluid dynamics, seismological data processing, oil reserve simulation, climate model calculation, material science modeling, and DNA protein calculations.

Final Thoughts: 2005 and Beyond

Many Asian analysts seem to think China is poised to take a potentially competitive microprocessor market position within just a few years. China's high tech exports averaged 46.5 billion dollars in 2001, nearly a fifteen-fold increase as compared to numbers of just ten years ago. Given the track record of the Acadamy of Science combined the backing of several corporations and the government itself, it appears China certainly does have a bright future in the international semiconductor scene