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

 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

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.