

Chinese invest $5bn to build Intel x86 clone (Godson) - iwwr
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/25/ict_godson_3b_chip/

======
rbanffy
"Wouldn't it be funny if Silicon Graphics started building systems with these
Godson-3 chips? They could dust off Irix and take it out for a spin on some
new iron and allow it to run x64-based Linux applications in emulation mode"

Love the idea, specially they build some nice desktop systems. But IRIX would
need some serious work in order to be competitive again. Linux on MIPS would
be a much more practical choice.

------
bane
Maybe it's time for the State Department to revisit technology export
restrictions to China?

~~~
wmf
Are the proceedings of ISCA really a "technology"?

------
dstein
Calling this a clone is a understatement to say the least. At 16-core, 2 GHz,
and 512 gigaflops these are some pretty serious numbers. China is getting
scary.

------
Scaevolus
Calling this an x86 chip is misleading:

"...the Godson-3 chips have instructions added to help the QEMU hypervisor
(the one that's at the heart of Red Hat's KVM hypervisor) to translate
instructions from x86 to MIPS format. According to early benchmarks, the
emulation penalty is about 30 per cent."

------
snowwindwaves
I recall reading an article saying that the latest intel chips had 4-5 billion
transistors, this article doesn`t have any transistor counts higher than 600
million.

Something must be missing.

~~~
wmf
What's missing is single-thread performance.

(Also, I think Intel is in the 2-3B transistor range.)

