people’s processor: embrace china’s homegrown computer ch
imagine that your nation is entirely dependent on a belligerent and economically unstable foreign country for a precious commodity. imagine that without that commodity, your entire society would grind to a halt.
got it? ok, now imagine that your nation is china, the belligerent nation is the us, and the commodity is cpus.
for china to maintain its blistering pace of growth — about 8 percent over the course of the global financial meltdown — the nation’s leaders know they must transition to a postindustrial economy as rapidly as they transitioned to a free-market economy 30 years ago. computers are key to doing that. the country’s demand for pcs is enormous. the chinese purchased 39.6 million of them in 2008. and that number is only going to climb — 75 percent of the population still doesn’t have access to the internet. but the vast majority of pcs sold in china are running central processing units created by the us companies intel and amd. this poses a range of problems; perhaps the biggest is that it locks china into paying first-world prices for cpus. china is also deeply reluctant to build military hardware on top of western processors. (and if that sounds paranoid, keep in mind that there’s concern in washington over whether the us military should use american-designed chips that have merely been manufactured overseas.)
given those issues, it’s not hard to understand why the chinese government sponsored an ambitious initiative to create a sort of national processor. work on the loongson, or dragon chip, began in 2001 at the institute of computing technology in beijing. the goal was to create a chip that would be versatile enough to drive anything from an industrial robot to a supercomputer. one of the first loongson-powered computers appeared in 2006, an ultracompact desktop pc known as the fuloong (lucky dragon). it was built by the chinese company lemote, which soon followed that up with a cheap netbook. and china is now boasting that a third-generation multicore loongson chip, currently in the prototype stage, will be used to power a petaflop supercomputer.
china’s decision to roll its own processors has gone largely unnoticed in the west. it shouldn’t. the country is incredibly motivated for the project to succeed — it has become a cornerstone of the national high-tech r&d program embarked upon in 1986. and we know that the chinese are very good at leveraging economies of scale. the loongson chip is going to change more than just computer-ownership rates in the most populous nation on the planet. it’s going to have a profound impact on computers everywhere.
for starters, it could help usher in an era of true post-windows pcs.
because the loongson eschews the standard x86 chip architecture, it can’t run the full version of microsoft windows without software emulation. to encourage adoption of the processor, the institute of computing technology is adapting everything from java to openoffice for the loongson chip and releasing it all under a free software license. lemote positions its netbook as the only computer in the world with nothing but free software, right down to the bios burned into the motherboard chip that tells it how to boot up. it’s for this last reason that richard “gnu/linux”
stallman, granddaddy of the free software movement, uses a laptop with a loongson chip.
loongson could also reshape the global pc business. “compared to intel and ibm, we are still in the cradle,” concedes weiwu hu, chief architect of the loongson. but he also notes that china’s enormous domestic demand isn’t the only potential market for his cpu. “i think many other poor countries, such as those in africa, need low-cost solutions,” he says.
cheap chinese processors could corner emerging markets in the developing world (and be a perk for the nation’s allies and trade partners).
and that’s just the beginning. “these chips have implications for space exploration, intelligence gathering, industrialization, encryption, and international commerce,” says tom halfhill, a senior analyst for microprocessor report.
will loongson-based pcs make inroads with average consumers in the west?
you can already order a lemote netbook online. it isn’t any cheaper or better than other entry-level netbooks, and reviews from geeky hardware enthusiast sites are less than enthusiastic. but these crude first-generation products hark back to another wave of boxy, underpowered consumer goods that were initially regarded as mere curiosities in the west. they were called toyotas.
christopher mims (christopher.mims @gmail.com) wrote about new drilling technologies in issue 17.09.
人民的处理器“拥抱中国国产计算机芯片”
想象一下，如果你国家的珍贵商品是完全依赖于好战国及经济不稳定的外国。试想一下，一旦没有了这种商品，、整个社会就要停顿下来。
明白了吗？假设你的国家是中国，而好战国是美国，而这个商品的就是处理器。
在全球金融海啸的环境下，中国保持8％的发展步伐。国家领导人知道，必须迅速过渡到工业经济，就像30年前过渡到自由市场经济一样，而计算机更是转变的关键所在。中国对电脑有巨大的需求量，2008年中国购买力是39.6万台，而且这个数字还在不断上升,因为还有75%的人仍没有接触网络。但是在中国售出的数量巨大的个人电脑中的大多数cpu是美国公司intel和amd制造的。这就带来了一系列问题，可能最大的问题，在于它使中国陷入了要以发达国家的价格购买cpu的困境。 （如果这听起来有点偏执，记住华盛顿关注的也只是美国芯片是否是美国设计，而仅仅在海外制造。）
鉴于这些问题，不难理解为什么中国政府要雄心勃勃的自主研发国产处理器。这个就是龙芯，于2001年在北京计算技术研究所开始研发，其目标是创造一款通用芯片，可以应用在工业机器人或任何一台超级计算机上。首台基于龙芯芯片的计算机出现于2006年，是中科龙梦公司生产制造的(福珑)迷你电脑，其随后还发布了一款便宜的上网本。而中国现在已研发出第三代龙芯多核芯片，目前正处于测试阶段，将被应用于千万亿次超级计算机。
中国要推出自制处理器的决定在西方被严重忽视，这是很不应该的。该国将会以令人难以置信的速度推进这个项目的成功-它已成为国家1986年后高新技术的基石。我们知道，中方非常善于利用规模经济，龙芯芯片将会改变地球上人口最多国家的计算机拥有率。它将深远影响着所有地方的计算机。
作为先行者，他可能引导我们进入后视窗个人电脑时代。
因为龙芯绕开了标准x86芯片架构，他要运行完整版本的微软视窗软件就不能避免软件效仿。为了推广处理器的应用，计算所改编了一系列从java到openoffice的软件以适应龙芯芯片并且全部在免费软件许可下发布。龙梦将其上网本定义为全世界唯一一款全免费软件的计算机。其bios直接烧制在主板上指导启动。 这也是自由软件运动之父richard stallman使用龙芯芯片笔记本的原因。
龙芯会重塑全球pc行业。龙芯总设计师胡伟武指出“与英特尔和ibm公司相比，我们仍然在摇篮里”。但面对国内庞大的市场需求，潜在市场并不仅在cpu，“我认为许多其他贫穷国家，如非洲国家，需要低成本的5845cc威尼斯下载的解决方案” 。较低价格的中国处理器可以在世界新兴市场的任何一个角落突显出来（并为国家建立起联盟国及贸易伙伴）。
而这仅仅是个开始，一个微处理器报告高级分析师tom halfhill说到： “这些芯片将牵连着空间探索，收集情报，工业化，产业化，加密以及国际贸易”。
龙芯的电脑将会侵蚀西方的消费者？你现在已经可以网上订购龙梦上网本，他并不比其他任何入门级的上网本便宜或是更好用，而硬件爱好者网站对他的评论也并不积极。但是这些外形粗糙的一代产品让人联想起同样其貌不扬动力不足的，在西方最初只是引人好奇的消费品，丰田汽车。
