China's Chips to Power Blade Servers This Year

From PC World: Blade servers based on microprocessors designed in China will power a supercomputer prototype to be revealed by a government-backed Chinese firm in September, the company said Tuesday.

The blade servers, the first running on China's Godson chips, will later power the country's first petaflop-class supercomputer slated for completion late next year, said a spokesman for the firm, Dawning. A petaflop computer is capable of performing one million billion "flops," or floating point operations per second.

The computer unveiled this year will be suited for use in scientific research and arms development, the spokesman said. Dawning will design Godson servers for other markets if it sees demand for them, he said.

But demand may be low. China has funded work on the Godson line of chips since 2001 to create a low-cost alternative to CPUs controlled by foreign firms. Godson chips power products from firewall appliances to off-brand laptops running Linux, but sales have never taken off. The chips have a MIPS core that is incompatible with the x86 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices that are used in most PCs. Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite run on x86 processors, not MIPS ones.

Godson's creators still hope the chips will gain a commercial presence in coming years. The chips are also known by the name Loongson.

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