China Take On Intel With x86 Simulating Godson-3 CPU

China is looking to take on Intel, AMD and VIA with their Loongson, or "dragon chip" CPU.  Codenamed Godson-3, the new processor is the latest product of a government-run project involving more than 200 researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Computing Technology (ICT).  Current US federal law prevents the most current microprocessors being exported to China; the company generally receives products a few generations back.  China's move to produce its own chips is an obvious attempt to bypass that foreign dependency; Godson-3 is the latest of a series of CPUs made in China by the French-Italian company ST Microelectronics.  Earlier versions have found their way into low-cost PCs running open-source software.

What differentiates Godson-3 from its predecessors, then, is the inclusion of an x86 simulator: 200 lines of code that enable the chip to run the wealth of software compatible with Intel's architecture.  Since the Chinese developers have not actually replicated the architecture, only simulated it, they are free from licencing costs; Intel have responded by pointing out that performance is only 80-percent of actual x86 chips, and that they are yet to examine the so-far undisclosed Godson-3 instruction set to see if any patents have been violated.

Godson-3 has been designed to be scalable; a four-core version will be available in 2009, while an eight-core version is in development.  Parts of the chip can be independently powered down to save energy, or cores set to run at different speeds.  The development team are quoting power draw for the four-core chip at 10W and the eight-core at 20W.

[via Slashdot]