

The mysterious processor behind China’s first homegrown supercomputer - ukdm
http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/thinking-tech/the-mysterious-processor-behind-chinas-first-homegrown-supercomputer/5556/

======
gaius
_MIPS processors in general, haven’t been tested in the context of the modern
supercomputer_

O RLY? Someone ought to tell (what's left of) SGI about that.

~~~
kanwisher
Sgi started switching to x86 for their supercomputers quite a while ago

~~~
gaius
Yes that it true, however it is also true that they were making 2048-CPU MIPS
IRIX supercomputers before that, so to claim that MIPS is untried in the
massively-parallel space is untrue.

~~~
CamperBob
Of course, that whole 2048-CPU IRIX machine was probably about as fast as a
modern high-end video card.

------
jws
8 core per die MIPS based processor at 1Ghz.

Not much else to the article other than a "China doesn't need Intel/AMD
theme".

~~~
Retric
This seems like a bad idea.

Let’s assume it costs a few million to design this chip, well you can already
buy a an i7 which has 4 cores runs at 3.06GHz costs about 250$ in bulk. That’s
4,000 CPU’s per million in development costs before they see a single CPU off
the line. If they get something 20% better then they are looking at a few
hundred thousand chips to break even.

PS: They suggest that it’s going to be 30% slower than a 6 core chip which
suggests it’s on par with a current generation chip 4core CPU.

~~~
die_sekte
China wants to be independent as far as computing goes. That is all.

~~~
Retric
There are plenty of reasons to build your own chip's. For example, NSA was
doing so, and probably still does. But, it only worth it if your making
something dramatically different than an x86 CPU.

The problem is keeping up with Intel is a ridiculously expensive proposition.
_analysis showed Intel's R &D expenditures were $22.1 billion between 2001 and
2005_
[http://www.emsnow.com/newsarchives/archivedetails.cfm?ID=136...](http://www.emsnow.com/newsarchives/archivedetails.cfm?ID=13632)
Either staying a few generations behind and building more chips, or buying
from the beast seems like the best option.

PS: Intel does manufacturing in china
([http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/06/intel-china-
fab...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/06/intel-china-fab-to-
use-65nm-process-produce-notebook-chips.ars)) so they already have access to
slightly behind the time manufacturing technology.

~~~
dcx
Hmmm. Could this possibly be something to do with US supercomputer export
controls? Don't know much about this but a quick google showed that the US has
been tightening controls lately.

I wonder what people are using supercomputers for in the military these days
anyway - UAV? Crypto? I'm guessing ballistics is pretty well solved. And you
hear the occasional story about suits showing up and requesting that labs
disable-in-hardware the execution of Shor's algorithm on their quantum-related
tech...

~~~
caf
Nuclear weapon R&D. That's how the 5 weapons states acknowledged by the NPT
have been able to maintain the unofficial test moratorium - all the
supercritical explosions are happening in simulation.

------
msy
Given China's proclivity for stealing tech and previous history of stolen
processors I'll believe this is evidence of China's R&D capability when an
independent 3rd party tears the chip down.

~~~
runjake
I'm not sure if you didn't read the article or are unfamiliar with the MIPS
platform, but it is widely licensed and still widely used in certain embedded
segments.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture#Licensable_ar...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture#Licensable_architecture)

My first thought upon seeing the headline was "IP theft" too.

~~~
msy
I'm familiar with MIPS, I'm was referring more to the specific implementation
and fabrication technology.

------
metageek
Since when is MIPS mysterious?

~~~
dkersten
Hell, I even know a small bit of 64bit MIPS assembly...

~~~
brettnak
Yeah, I know a bit of MIPS assembly as well. It was my understanding that MIPS
was the standard assembly to teach. Though, this is just through the narrow
lens of my life. At my school, when you learned assembly, the first one was
generally MIPS.

~~~
dkersten
We learned x86 first and then MIPS. We went in pretty deep with MIPS though,
going so far as running our programs in a simulator which visually showed the
states of the different pipeline stages as the instructions were executed. It
was a pretty interesting course, actually. At the end, the lecturer gave us a
competition where the person who could sort a list of numbers in the fewest
cycles won. I implemented quicksort and I think it took something like 10K
cycles to sort 100 numbers. I think the median in the class was 20K and the
best was 6K. Fun :)

------
curtis
It's not mentioned in the article, but Loongson 3 adds instructions
specifically to support Intel emulation. According to Wikipedia
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson>):

 _Loongson 3 adds over 200 new instructions to speed up x86 instruction
execution at a cost of 5% of the total die area. The new instructions help
QEMU translate x86 instructions by lowering the overhead of executing
x86/CISC-style instructions in the MIPS pipeline. With additional improvements
in QEMU from ICT, Loongson-3 achieves an average of 70% the performance of
executing native binaries when running x86 binaries from nine benchmarks._

------
frou_dh
Trivia: rms uses a Loongson powered laptop.

------
radicaldreamer
MIPS processors are a tad bit more exotic than CISC or RISC architecture, but
hardly mysterious. Hell, the PS2's main CPU was a MIPS processor and plenty of
people have tinkered with it for various things, including a super computer:
[http://www.geek.com/articles/games/researchers-create-a-
play...](http://www.geek.com/articles/games/researchers-create-a-
playstation-2-based-supercomputer-20030527/)

------
drallison
Why post a link to this nothing article on HN? There is nothing new here
except for the misconceptions of the authors.

