ChineseTiger1986
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Don't worry, we will meet the balance, since the Chinese people always love to build more stuffs.
China Economy Forum
- Thread starter EagleEyes
- Start date
Don't worry, we will meet the balance, since the Chinese people always love to build more stuffs.
yusheng
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Chinese Supercomputer
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/technology/28compute.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
China Wrests Supercomputer Title From U.S.
By ASHLEE VANCE
Published: October 28, 2010
Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.
The Tianhe-1A computer in Tianjin, China, links thousands upon thousands of chips.
The computer, known as Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, which is at a national laboratory in Tennessee, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings.
Although the official list of the top 500 fastest machines, which comes out every six months, is not due to be completed by Mr. Dongarra until next week, he said the Chinese computer blows away the existing No. 1 machine. He added, We dont close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster.
Officials from the Chinese research center, the National University of Defense Technology, are expected to reveal the computers performance on Thursday at a conference in Beijing. The center says it is under the dual supervision of the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Education.
The race to build the fastest supercomputer has become a source of national pride as these machines are valued for their ability to solve problems critical to national interests in areas like defense, energy, finance and science. Supercomputing technology also finds its way into mainstream business; oil and gas companies use it to find reservoirs and Wall Street traders use it for superquick automated trades. Procter & Gamble even uses supercomputers to make sure that Pringles go into cans without breaking.
And typically, research centers with large supercomputers are magnets for top scientific talent, adding significance to the presence of the machines well beyond just cranking through calculations.
Over the last decade, the Chinese have steadily inched up in the rankings of supercomputers. Tianhe-1A stands as the culmination of billions of dollars in investment and scientific development, as China has gone from a computing afterthought to a world technology superpower.
What is scary about this is that the U.S. dominance in high-performance computing is at risk, said Wu-chun Feng, a supercomputing expert and professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. One could argue that this hits the foundation of our economic future.
Modern supercomputers are built by combining thousands of small computer servers and using software to turn them into a single entity. In that sense, any organization with enough money and expertise can buy what amount to off-the-shelf components and create a fast machine.
The Chinese system follows that model by linking thousands upon thousands of chips made by the American companies Intel and Nvidia. But the secret sauce behind the system and the technological achievement is the interconnect, or networking technology, developed by Chinese researchers that shuttles data back and forth across the smaller computers at breakneck rates, Mr. Dongarra said.
That technology was built by them, Mr. Dongarra said. They are taking supercomputing very seriously and making a deep commitment.
The Chinese interconnect can handle data at about twice the speed of a common interconnect called InfiniBand used in many supercomputers.
For decades, the United States has developed most of the underlying technology that goes into the massive supercomputers and has built the largest, fastest machines at research laboratories and universities. Some of the top systems simulate the effects of nuclear weapons, while others predict the weather and aid in energy research.
In 2002, the United States lost its crown as supercomputing kingpin for the first time in stunning fashion when Japan unveiled a machine with more horsepower than the top 20 American computers combined. The United States government responded in kind, forming groups to plot a comeback and pouring money into supercomputing projects. The United States regained its leadership status in 2004, and has kept it, until now.
At the computing conference on Thursday in China, the researchers will discuss how they are using the new system for scientific research in fields like astrophysics and bio-molecular modeling. Tianhe-1A, which is housed in a building at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, can perform mathematical operations about 29 million times faster than one of the earliest supercomputers, built in 1976.
For the record, it performs 2.5 times 10 to the 15th power mathematical operations per second.
Mr. Dongarra said a long-running Chinese project to build chips to rival those from Intel and others remained under way and looked promising. Its not quite there yet, but it will be in a year or two, he said.
He also said that in November, when the list comes out, he expected a second Chinese computer to be in the top five, culminating years of investment.
The Japanese came out of nowhere and really caught people off guard, Mr. Feng said. With China, you could see this one coming.
Steven J. Wallach, a well-known computer designer, played down the importance of taking the top spot on the supercomputer rankings.
Its interesting, but its like getting to the four-minute mile, Mr. Wallach said. The world didnt stop. This is just a snapshot in time.
The research labs often spend weeks tuning their systems to perform well on the standard horsepower test. But just because a system can hammer through trillions of calculations per second does not mean it will do well on the specialized jobs that researchers want to use it for, Mr. Wallach added.
The United States has plans in place to make much faster machines out of proprietary components and to advance the software used by these systems so that they are easy for researchers to use. But those computers remain years away, and for now, China is king.
They want to show they are No. 1 in the world, no matter what it is, Mr. Wallach said. I dont blame them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/technology/28compute.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
China Wrests Supercomputer Title From U.S.
By ASHLEE VANCE
Published: October 28, 2010
Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.
The Tianhe-1A computer in Tianjin, China, links thousands upon thousands of chips.
The computer, known as Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, which is at a national laboratory in Tennessee, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings.
Although the official list of the top 500 fastest machines, which comes out every six months, is not due to be completed by Mr. Dongarra until next week, he said the Chinese computer blows away the existing No. 1 machine. He added, We dont close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster.
Officials from the Chinese research center, the National University of Defense Technology, are expected to reveal the computers performance on Thursday at a conference in Beijing. The center says it is under the dual supervision of the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Education.
The race to build the fastest supercomputer has become a source of national pride as these machines are valued for their ability to solve problems critical to national interests in areas like defense, energy, finance and science. Supercomputing technology also finds its way into mainstream business; oil and gas companies use it to find reservoirs and Wall Street traders use it for superquick automated trades. Procter & Gamble even uses supercomputers to make sure that Pringles go into cans without breaking.
And typically, research centers with large supercomputers are magnets for top scientific talent, adding significance to the presence of the machines well beyond just cranking through calculations.
Over the last decade, the Chinese have steadily inched up in the rankings of supercomputers. Tianhe-1A stands as the culmination of billions of dollars in investment and scientific development, as China has gone from a computing afterthought to a world technology superpower.
What is scary about this is that the U.S. dominance in high-performance computing is at risk, said Wu-chun Feng, a supercomputing expert and professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. One could argue that this hits the foundation of our economic future.
Modern supercomputers are built by combining thousands of small computer servers and using software to turn them into a single entity. In that sense, any organization with enough money and expertise can buy what amount to off-the-shelf components and create a fast machine.
The Chinese system follows that model by linking thousands upon thousands of chips made by the American companies Intel and Nvidia. But the secret sauce behind the system and the technological achievement is the interconnect, or networking technology, developed by Chinese researchers that shuttles data back and forth across the smaller computers at breakneck rates, Mr. Dongarra said.
That technology was built by them, Mr. Dongarra said. They are taking supercomputing very seriously and making a deep commitment.
The Chinese interconnect can handle data at about twice the speed of a common interconnect called InfiniBand used in many supercomputers.
For decades, the United States has developed most of the underlying technology that goes into the massive supercomputers and has built the largest, fastest machines at research laboratories and universities. Some of the top systems simulate the effects of nuclear weapons, while others predict the weather and aid in energy research.
In 2002, the United States lost its crown as supercomputing kingpin for the first time in stunning fashion when Japan unveiled a machine with more horsepower than the top 20 American computers combined. The United States government responded in kind, forming groups to plot a comeback and pouring money into supercomputing projects. The United States regained its leadership status in 2004, and has kept it, until now.
At the computing conference on Thursday in China, the researchers will discuss how they are using the new system for scientific research in fields like astrophysics and bio-molecular modeling. Tianhe-1A, which is housed in a building at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, can perform mathematical operations about 29 million times faster than one of the earliest supercomputers, built in 1976.
For the record, it performs 2.5 times 10 to the 15th power mathematical operations per second.
Mr. Dongarra said a long-running Chinese project to build chips to rival those from Intel and others remained under way and looked promising. Its not quite there yet, but it will be in a year or two, he said.
He also said that in November, when the list comes out, he expected a second Chinese computer to be in the top five, culminating years of investment.
The Japanese came out of nowhere and really caught people off guard, Mr. Feng said. With China, you could see this one coming.
Steven J. Wallach, a well-known computer designer, played down the importance of taking the top spot on the supercomputer rankings.
Its interesting, but its like getting to the four-minute mile, Mr. Wallach said. The world didnt stop. This is just a snapshot in time.
The research labs often spend weeks tuning their systems to perform well on the standard horsepower test. But just because a system can hammer through trillions of calculations per second does not mean it will do well on the specialized jobs that researchers want to use it for, Mr. Wallach added.
The United States has plans in place to make much faster machines out of proprietary components and to advance the software used by these systems so that they are easy for researchers to use. But those computers remain years away, and for now, China is king.
They want to show they are No. 1 in the world, no matter what it is, Mr. Wallach said. I dont blame them.
SinoChallenger
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^ Good. Now we need to grab the top spot from USA in military naval power as well.
Backbencher
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online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203400604578074283948389390.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Backbencher
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Here are seven reasons why investors should
think twice before investing in Chinese stocks.
1. Government interference
With a domineering government like China's,
the risk of harmful meddling in the economy is
much greater. This may take many forms in
China, from economic data manipulation to
inappropriately close ties between business and
government. For instance, there have been
reports of government officials falsely inflating a
variety of economic data -- corporate profits,
corporate tax receipts and overall economic
output -- by as much as 2%. Thus, China's
current slowdown could be much worse than it
appears.
Because the Chinese government is autocratic,
shareholder-unfriendly regulations can also be
quickly imposed. For instance, China's coal
industry was far more robust until a few years
ago, when the government established
production minimums and other rules favoring
oligopoly. Many analysts now see the country's
coal industry much less competitive than before.
2. Lack of transparency
Incomplete, inaccurate or nonexistent financial
data that make it difficult or impossible to value
individual companies is a common scourge of
emerging-market investors. It's all too common
among U.S.-listed Chinese firms, which have
been known to report different revenue
numbers and other data to the Securities and
Exchange Commission and Chinese officials.
There have also been reports of company
suppliers being owned or controlled by
management as a way to milk companies from
the outside. In a highly-publicized scandal a
couple years ago, the Chinese wastewater
treatment company RINO International Corp.
( RINO ) lent its CEO and chairwoman, the CEO's
wife, $3.5 million without a signed loan
agreement. Trading in the stock was suspended
Nov. 19, 2010, and has not resumed.
3. Unfair advantages for state-owned
companies
There are more than 100,000 state-owned
businesses in China. Of these, about 100 are
centrally-controlled "national champions" that
dominate in their industries, in particular
because they're heavily backed by the
government and enjoy a range of unfair
advantages, such as low-cost loans from official
banks that in turn receive guaranteed profits for
providing such loans. (Loan costs for private
companies are typically three times what state-
owned firm pays, if the a private company can
get a loan at all.) Some of China's better-known
national champions include the integrated oil
giant China Petroleum & Chemical Corp.
(NYSE: SNP ) and telecommunications
behemoth China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL) .
4. Currency manipulation
Most economists agree the yuan is undervalued
by 25-40%, and China achieves this by pegging
the yuan to the dollar. The goal, say critics of
this policy, is to give China an unfair trade
advantage by keeping exchange rates artificially
low so Chinese goods can be cheaper than U.S.-
made products. Besides hindering the U.S.
economy, this policy produces huge trade
surpluses for China, which in turn must put
hundreds of billions of dollars back into the
United States every year to maintain the yuan's
link to the dollar. Because China does this
mainly by purchasing U.S. government bonds,
the United States is now in debt to China to the
tune of nearly $3 trillion. Some economists also
say currency manipulation aided the bursting of
the real estate bubble in 2008, because China
also plowed billions of surplus dollars into U.S.
real estate.
5. Trade and labor violations
A major gripe against China is its widespread use
of government subsidies to bankroll the rapid
growth of its industries. One of the most
publicized examples is solar and wind power,
where U.S. companies find it virtually
impossible to keep up with subsidized Chinese
competitors. A couple weeks ago, the Obama
administration reported nearly 200 Chinese
subsidies to the World Trade Organization,
arguing that many violate free trade rules.
Critics of China also point to horrendous labor
violations, like the failure to enforce a
government mandate limiting the workday to
11 hours and factory employees commonly
working for days or even weeks straight without
a break.
6. Government-created bubbles
Many investors fear extremely fast government-
aided growth has created bubbles in the Chinese
economy that could burst, damaging the global
economy in the process. For example, virtually
no one would dispute the existence of a bubble
in Chinese commercial real estate. The sector is
now so overbuilt, there are dozens of "ghost
cities" like Henan province's Zhengzhou New
District, which is replete with business centers,
modern high rises and shops -- but almost no
inhabitants.
A similar situation likely exists in residential real
estate. The Chinese capital of Beijing alone has
more vacant homes than the entire United
States (3.8 million vs. 2.5 million). There may
be a dangerous commodities bubble in China,
too, based on reports of massive unused
stockpiles -- like the nearly 10 million tons of
coal sitting idle at Qinhuangdao port, one of the
largest coal storage areas in China. The prior
record was 9.3 million tons in November 2008,
when the global economy was presumably far
worse.
7. A possibility of armed conflict with Japan
Nothing destabilizes markets and upsets
economies like armed conflict, and there does
appear to be some risk of this between China
and Japan over several disputed islands in the
East China Sea. The nasty feud erupted in mid-
September, when Japan purchased the islands
from a private owner -- an event that triggered
violent protests in China, produced heated
rhetoric between the two governments and put
a strain on business relations between the two
countries. Most political experts consider the
risk of military confrontation very slim at this
point, though armed conflict could materialize if
any incidents occurred between Chinese and
Japanese patrol vessels in the area.
I don't think Chinese stocks are worth the risk. I
certainly wouldn't buy individual Chinese stocks
-- nor would I invest in a fund or exchange-
traded fund ( ETF ) devoted to China. I strongly
suspect government officials are painting a
much rosier picture of the Chinese economy
than actually exists, and I also suspect their
economy could be a lot closer than anyone
would like to admit to a crisis like the U.S.
suffered in 2008.
seekingalpha.com/article/938031-7-reasons-why-investors-should-be-afraid-of-china
think twice before investing in Chinese stocks.
1. Government interference
With a domineering government like China's,
the risk of harmful meddling in the economy is
much greater. This may take many forms in
China, from economic data manipulation to
inappropriately close ties between business and
government. For instance, there have been
reports of government officials falsely inflating a
variety of economic data -- corporate profits,
corporate tax receipts and overall economic
output -- by as much as 2%. Thus, China's
current slowdown could be much worse than it
appears.
Because the Chinese government is autocratic,
shareholder-unfriendly regulations can also be
quickly imposed. For instance, China's coal
industry was far more robust until a few years
ago, when the government established
production minimums and other rules favoring
oligopoly. Many analysts now see the country's
coal industry much less competitive than before.
2. Lack of transparency
Incomplete, inaccurate or nonexistent financial
data that make it difficult or impossible to value
individual companies is a common scourge of
emerging-market investors. It's all too common
among U.S.-listed Chinese firms, which have
been known to report different revenue
numbers and other data to the Securities and
Exchange Commission and Chinese officials.
There have also been reports of company
suppliers being owned or controlled by
management as a way to milk companies from
the outside. In a highly-publicized scandal a
couple years ago, the Chinese wastewater
treatment company RINO International Corp.
( RINO ) lent its CEO and chairwoman, the CEO's
wife, $3.5 million without a signed loan
agreement. Trading in the stock was suspended
Nov. 19, 2010, and has not resumed.
3. Unfair advantages for state-owned
companies
There are more than 100,000 state-owned
businesses in China. Of these, about 100 are
centrally-controlled "national champions" that
dominate in their industries, in particular
because they're heavily backed by the
government and enjoy a range of unfair
advantages, such as low-cost loans from official
banks that in turn receive guaranteed profits for
providing such loans. (Loan costs for private
companies are typically three times what state-
owned firm pays, if the a private company can
get a loan at all.) Some of China's better-known
national champions include the integrated oil
giant China Petroleum & Chemical Corp.
(NYSE: SNP ) and telecommunications
behemoth China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL) .
4. Currency manipulation
Most economists agree the yuan is undervalued
by 25-40%, and China achieves this by pegging
the yuan to the dollar. The goal, say critics of
this policy, is to give China an unfair trade
advantage by keeping exchange rates artificially
low so Chinese goods can be cheaper than U.S.-
made products. Besides hindering the U.S.
economy, this policy produces huge trade
surpluses for China, which in turn must put
hundreds of billions of dollars back into the
United States every year to maintain the yuan's
link to the dollar. Because China does this
mainly by purchasing U.S. government bonds,
the United States is now in debt to China to the
tune of nearly $3 trillion. Some economists also
say currency manipulation aided the bursting of
the real estate bubble in 2008, because China
also plowed billions of surplus dollars into U.S.
real estate.
5. Trade and labor violations
A major gripe against China is its widespread use
of government subsidies to bankroll the rapid
growth of its industries. One of the most
publicized examples is solar and wind power,
where U.S. companies find it virtually
impossible to keep up with subsidized Chinese
competitors. A couple weeks ago, the Obama
administration reported nearly 200 Chinese
subsidies to the World Trade Organization,
arguing that many violate free trade rules.
Critics of China also point to horrendous labor
violations, like the failure to enforce a
government mandate limiting the workday to
11 hours and factory employees commonly
working for days or even weeks straight without
a break.
6. Government-created bubbles
Many investors fear extremely fast government-
aided growth has created bubbles in the Chinese
economy that could burst, damaging the global
economy in the process. For example, virtually
no one would dispute the existence of a bubble
in Chinese commercial real estate. The sector is
now so overbuilt, there are dozens of "ghost
cities" like Henan province's Zhengzhou New
District, which is replete with business centers,
modern high rises and shops -- but almost no
inhabitants.
A similar situation likely exists in residential real
estate. The Chinese capital of Beijing alone has
more vacant homes than the entire United
States (3.8 million vs. 2.5 million). There may
be a dangerous commodities bubble in China,
too, based on reports of massive unused
stockpiles -- like the nearly 10 million tons of
coal sitting idle at Qinhuangdao port, one of the
largest coal storage areas in China. The prior
record was 9.3 million tons in November 2008,
when the global economy was presumably far
worse.
7. A possibility of armed conflict with Japan
Nothing destabilizes markets and upsets
economies like armed conflict, and there does
appear to be some risk of this between China
and Japan over several disputed islands in the
East China Sea. The nasty feud erupted in mid-
September, when Japan purchased the islands
from a private owner -- an event that triggered
violent protests in China, produced heated
rhetoric between the two governments and put
a strain on business relations between the two
countries. Most political experts consider the
risk of military confrontation very slim at this
point, though armed conflict could materialize if
any incidents occurred between Chinese and
Japanese patrol vessels in the area.
I don't think Chinese stocks are worth the risk. I
certainly wouldn't buy individual Chinese stocks
-- nor would I invest in a fund or exchange-
traded fund ( ETF ) devoted to China. I strongly
suspect government officials are painting a
much rosier picture of the Chinese economy
than actually exists, and I also suspect their
economy could be a lot closer than anyone
would like to admit to a crisis like the U.S.
suffered in 2008.
seekingalpha.com/article/938031-7-reasons-why-investors-should-be-afraid-of-china
shuttler
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shuttler
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- Feb 21, 2012
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Only 3 countries have claim the top spot in supercomputing Top500 list! We are one of them!
The next Top500 will be published in Nov.. Let's see how far we can go!
WS-10 Engine
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I would rather have a FULLY domestic supercomputer with domestic CPU and GPU, domestic operating system, domestic interconnect, etc that gets in the top 20 rather than have the fastest with foreign systems.
yusheng
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2007
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- 1,672
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- 6
Yes，
Chinese supercomputer is made up of American CPUs. China's Tianhe-1A uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs.
Intel or Nvidia/AMD chips are designed in the USA, Germany, Israel, and India, manufactured in Singapore, Costa Rica, Indonesia and Taiwan, assembled in China and soon in Vietnam.
You may not know that Intel's founder is not American and the founder of Nvidia is Chinese. You should be glad that America has all the help from foreigners while the Chinese basically rely on ourselves.
it is Chinese scientists ourselves that developed a new technology to link GPUs up. In this computer chinese cips are mixedly used. That matters. China’s innovative capacity can’t be neglected as well.
as for Chinese CPU, and supercomputer made up of Chinese designed and made CPU
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/w...er-based-on-its-own-microprocessor-chips.html
See the next post for analysis of Chinese CPU,
on the other hand, Chinese internet website of next generation is under its way.
Chinese supercomputer is made up of American CPUs. China's Tianhe-1A uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs.
Intel or Nvidia/AMD chips are designed in the USA, Germany, Israel, and India, manufactured in Singapore, Costa Rica, Indonesia and Taiwan, assembled in China and soon in Vietnam.
You may not know that Intel's founder is not American and the founder of Nvidia is Chinese. You should be glad that America has all the help from foreigners while the Chinese basically rely on ourselves.
it is Chinese scientists ourselves that developed a new technology to link GPUs up. In this computer chinese cips are mixedly used. That matters. China’s innovative capacity can’t be neglected as well.
as for Chinese CPU, and supercomputer made up of Chinese designed and made CPU
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/w...er-based-on-its-own-microprocessor-chips.html
See the next post for analysis of Chinese CPU,
on the other hand, Chinese internet website of next generation is under its way.
yusheng
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2007
- Messages
- 1,672
- Reaction score
- 6
Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game - details: Part 1
Reported by Nebojsa Novakovic on Wednesday,
December 21 2011 11:18 am
Last week's report on CPUs, mentioning the Chinese new-generation entries, did raise some waves on various online forums. Here's a bit more on some of those processors.
China has now officially gone deep into the core of high end computing, way to the deepest level - designing and manufacturing its own CPUs - to complete the whole vertical stack from the processor to the application. That includes having own designs covering everything from smartphone to supercomputer, based on three main architectural families: ARM, MIPS and Alpha.
Our last week's report, and its coverage of the Chinese CPUs, has sparked quite a few online comments on various forums, from those of encouragement and seeking more diversified CPU futures, to outright dismissal of these chips as copies or inferior designs, or not having, out of all things, X86 architecture - widely regarded as the worst ever CPU architecture from a design point of view - as a 'proof of true capability'.
Well, let's take a look at the three chosen main architectures here. ARM, MIPS and Alpha are all native RISC architectures - meaning simple, symmetric, orthogonal instruction sets with only a few addressing modes and options, uniform instruction format and easy scalability to both wide cores, multi-cores and a range of speeds from low power to top performance, with much lower gate count required than any X86. Since China doesn't want to depend on Western software stack for its public and, especially, government use, it doesn't need to rely on X86 as this architecture's winning chip is software compatibility with hundreds of thousands of past applications.
So, why bother with the X86 complexities - both technical and legal - then? The internal market is more than good enough to, coupled with Linux and other open source stacks, provide complete solutions and the volumes required to justify these processors even commercially over long run.
Talking about legality: No, these are not fakes or illegal copies right now. The ARM and MIPS processors made in China are fully licensed by the relevant ARM and MIPS IP owning consortia, while the Shenwei Alpha-compatible chip is based on Digital (DEC) IP that is well over 15 years old now - quite ironic for a CPU that matches the best current X86 processors based on 2010 IP and in 2 generations later process.
MIPS - Dragon's Progeny
Loongson (Godson) is the name for the Chinese MIPS processors, developed by Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) at Beijing's Chinese Academy of Sciences, with Prof Hu Weiwu being the design leader. Prof Hu also happens to be a deputy at National People's Congress, which surely is helpful in gaining support for the overall project. For the past 9 years, the effort is run as a joint venture between the government and private enterprises through a company called BLX, a partnership between CAS and Jiangsu Zhongyi Group.
There were 3 major generations of these processors up to now, with the latest one - Loongson 3B - being an 8-core 1.05 GHz CPU, with each CPU having a 256-bit vector FP unit as well. Despite the low clock and 65 nm process, the efficient 4-way out-of-order cores and vector units with dual 256-bit FP ops per core per cycle, allow Loongson 3B to reach 16 GFLOPs per core at 1 GHz, some 130 GFLOPs peak FP rate in double precision at 1.05 GHz clock. For a comparison, the 3.3GHz Core i7 3960X with AVX would achieve some 160 GFLOPs peak in DP, while the Westmere (Core i7 990X) and Bulldozer CPUs would be at not more than two-thirds of this - Core i7 990X is at 90 GFLOPs peak, and AMD FX8150 at some 110 GFLOPs peak, all in DP. And, oh yes, the Loongson 3B achieves this performance at just 40 watts TDP, less than one third of the above competing CPUs.
Something even more interesting is that Loongson 3B has over 200 extra instructions in a separate box, which doesn't affect the main core integrity, that speed up execution of X86 software when using QEMU translator. The benefit of this, at a 5% die area cost, is running lots of X86 software at near native speeds - an approach that Alpha perfected over a decade ago with FX!32 software that enabled Alpha Windows NT to run many X86 titles at the time at high speed.
Anyway, since the core is reasonably efficient already, the next step for Loongson 3 is a 16-core version in 28 nm process, expected sometime in min 2012. The minor core improvements will be there in addition to a much higher clock rate, around 1.6 GHz, as well as larger L2 cache, greater than the current 4 MB. The 2 x 64 KB per core L1 caches are expected to stay on.
What about the software? Several major Linux distros do run - including Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva and China's own Red Flag. The BSD OS ports are done quite a while ago, as well as Windows CE port. Since there are quite a few consumer devices based on the previous Loongson / Godson processors, who knows, one day we may even see Android and Windows 8 ports, although there doesn't seem to be much pressure felt on the Chinese about it.
In the second part, we cover Alpha, ARM and China's own instruction set attempts.
Read more: Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game - details: Part 1 by VR-Zone.com
Reported by Nebojsa Novakovic on Wednesday,
December 21 2011 11:18 am
Last week's report on CPUs, mentioning the Chinese new-generation entries, did raise some waves on various online forums. Here's a bit more on some of those processors.
China has now officially gone deep into the core of high end computing, way to the deepest level - designing and manufacturing its own CPUs - to complete the whole vertical stack from the processor to the application. That includes having own designs covering everything from smartphone to supercomputer, based on three main architectural families: ARM, MIPS and Alpha.
Our last week's report, and its coverage of the Chinese CPUs, has sparked quite a few online comments on various forums, from those of encouragement and seeking more diversified CPU futures, to outright dismissal of these chips as copies or inferior designs, or not having, out of all things, X86 architecture - widely regarded as the worst ever CPU architecture from a design point of view - as a 'proof of true capability'.
Well, let's take a look at the three chosen main architectures here. ARM, MIPS and Alpha are all native RISC architectures - meaning simple, symmetric, orthogonal instruction sets with only a few addressing modes and options, uniform instruction format and easy scalability to both wide cores, multi-cores and a range of speeds from low power to top performance, with much lower gate count required than any X86. Since China doesn't want to depend on Western software stack for its public and, especially, government use, it doesn't need to rely on X86 as this architecture's winning chip is software compatibility with hundreds of thousands of past applications.
So, why bother with the X86 complexities - both technical and legal - then? The internal market is more than good enough to, coupled with Linux and other open source stacks, provide complete solutions and the volumes required to justify these processors even commercially over long run.
Talking about legality: No, these are not fakes or illegal copies right now. The ARM and MIPS processors made in China are fully licensed by the relevant ARM and MIPS IP owning consortia, while the Shenwei Alpha-compatible chip is based on Digital (DEC) IP that is well over 15 years old now - quite ironic for a CPU that matches the best current X86 processors based on 2010 IP and in 2 generations later process.
MIPS - Dragon's Progeny
Loongson (Godson) is the name for the Chinese MIPS processors, developed by Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) at Beijing's Chinese Academy of Sciences, with Prof Hu Weiwu being the design leader. Prof Hu also happens to be a deputy at National People's Congress, which surely is helpful in gaining support for the overall project. For the past 9 years, the effort is run as a joint venture between the government and private enterprises through a company called BLX, a partnership between CAS and Jiangsu Zhongyi Group.
There were 3 major generations of these processors up to now, with the latest one - Loongson 3B - being an 8-core 1.05 GHz CPU, with each CPU having a 256-bit vector FP unit as well. Despite the low clock and 65 nm process, the efficient 4-way out-of-order cores and vector units with dual 256-bit FP ops per core per cycle, allow Loongson 3B to reach 16 GFLOPs per core at 1 GHz, some 130 GFLOPs peak FP rate in double precision at 1.05 GHz clock. For a comparison, the 3.3GHz Core i7 3960X with AVX would achieve some 160 GFLOPs peak in DP, while the Westmere (Core i7 990X) and Bulldozer CPUs would be at not more than two-thirds of this - Core i7 990X is at 90 GFLOPs peak, and AMD FX8150 at some 110 GFLOPs peak, all in DP. And, oh yes, the Loongson 3B achieves this performance at just 40 watts TDP, less than one third of the above competing CPUs.
Something even more interesting is that Loongson 3B has over 200 extra instructions in a separate box, which doesn't affect the main core integrity, that speed up execution of X86 software when using QEMU translator. The benefit of this, at a 5% die area cost, is running lots of X86 software at near native speeds - an approach that Alpha perfected over a decade ago with FX!32 software that enabled Alpha Windows NT to run many X86 titles at the time at high speed.
Anyway, since the core is reasonably efficient already, the next step for Loongson 3 is a 16-core version in 28 nm process, expected sometime in min 2012. The minor core improvements will be there in addition to a much higher clock rate, around 1.6 GHz, as well as larger L2 cache, greater than the current 4 MB. The 2 x 64 KB per core L1 caches are expected to stay on.
What about the software? Several major Linux distros do run - including Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva and China's own Red Flag. The BSD OS ports are done quite a while ago, as well as Windows CE port. Since there are quite a few consumer devices based on the previous Loongson / Godson processors, who knows, one day we may even see Android and Windows 8 ports, although there doesn't seem to be much pressure felt on the Chinese about it.
In the second part, we cover Alpha, ARM and China's own instruction set attempts.
Read more: Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game - details: Part 1 by VR-Zone.com
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Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game - details: Part 2,
AlphaReported by Nebojsa Novakovic on Monday, December 26 2011 9:03 am Earlier,
we looked at the background of Chinese high end microprocessor effort, as well as the most widely known of them, the Loongson MIPS family. In this second part, we cover Alpha.
Alpha was, for the long time around the turn of the century, the Formula 1 of microprocessors with its very simple, elegant yet extremely scalable RISC architecture focused on raw speed, and pure 64-bitness without any 32-bit modes or compatibility baggage. Between 1993 and 2001, the time of its untimely murder, it owned the majority of performance records, especially when it came to the processor performance - DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) system designers were sometimes too stingy with the memory and I/O systems, allowing other vendors to occassionally win the accolades in those tests. The most well known of those cores, the one that had the highest comparative performance advantage vs the competition, was 21164 a.k.a EV 5 family, which span three semicon process generations - 0.50, 0.35 and 0.25 microns.
The most widely spread volume-wise was the 0.35 micron 21164A in 1996-7, reaching up to 667 MHz, and beating the contemporary 266 MHz Pentium II by over two times in most benchmark tests of the time. The 21164 core, a simple but very high clock-optimised four-issue in-order design with two FP ops per clock, was also the most performance efficient of all Alphas, taking some 25 Watts at 667 MHz vs 75 Watts for the 600 MHz Pentium III 'Katmai' which followed few years later, still at lesser performance. The subsequent Alpha cores, such as 21264 EV6, brought up to double the performance per-clock, however at three times the power consumption per clock, a point very important when looking at the choices made later in this story.
The 21264 out-of order core was also scaled across three processes, including derivatives made by Samsung, the major Alpha architecture licensee. It, and its successor 21364 EV7, carried the performance torch until 2002 or so, well after Alpha's further public development was stopped. Do note the memory and I/O interconnect revolution with the EV7 - while the core was basically the same EV6 type, the on-chip 1.75 MB L2 cache, a 10-channel integrated Rambus memory controller with humongous memory bandwidth basically matching that of the L2 cache and enabling that cache to act as a low latency buffer for the memory system, and four parallel 6.4 GB/s coherent interconnect links to other 4 processors, scaling up to 512 sockets with directory support, were a revolution for year 2000 computing. Such things were only seen in PCs 5 years later with HyperTransport from AMD first, later followed by QPI from Intel. BOTH THESE INTERCONNECTS ARE DERIVED FROM OVER A DECADE-OLD ALPHA EV7.
Add to that more. The 21464 EV8, aimed for release in 2002 if things continued as originally planned, was to be the first processor with eight-issue wide superscalar out-of-order symmetrically multithreaded core, and we mean four threads out of each core here. The 'EV9' 21564 design was expected to add multi-core and huge, wide vector unit - up to 1 KILOBYTE wide - capability to the mix, enabling well over 100 GFLOPS DP floating point performance per core for 2004 timeframe. Remember, we are only now reaching such capabilities in late 2011, and need 6 to 8 cores for that. Anyway, the multithreading and vector enhancements designed well ahead of their time into the EV8 and EV9, never saw the light of the day in the open market.
In the late nineties, China saw the value and capability of Alpha, and built a number of Alpha systems, some of them very large for the time. It also fully licenced the Digital / Tru64 UNIX and related software stack, including getting the full source code, from Compaq after the latter bought DEC then, giving China the critical software control part. At the same time, having seen the business instabilities linked to the Digital-Compaq-HP transition, China seems to have been working on having its own Alpha flavour.
After over a decade of work and three generations of CPUs, Jiangnan Reseach Lab has shown the ShenWei (Sunway) SW-3 processor, the Chinese flavour of Alpha, not in a small workstation, not in a server, but in no less than a huge petaflop-class supercomputer machine in Jinan, Shandong - the Sunway BlueLight MPP, this past October. The CPU itself runs for over a year in a variety of systems, but displaying it running a petaflop machine was probably the best PR one could get, especially since foreign supercomputing dignitaries such as Jack Dongarra, the man behing TOP500 list and Linpack FP benchmark.
SW3 aka SW1600 is a 16-core, 64-bit RISC processor, with each core looking a lot like an improved version of the 21164A EV56 Alpha core, plus vector FP unit extension added to each core. While the initial speed range was 1 to 1.2 GHz in the 65nm process, the standard speed grade is a 1.1 GHz chip with 141 GFLOPs DP FP performance. The speed set for the Bluelight Petaflop machine's Top 500 run was 975 MHz, though. The quad-channel 128-bit DDR3 on-chip memory controller offers 68 GB/s bandwidth - yes, equivalent to 8 channels of DDR3-1066 server RAM.
The L1 and L2 cache sizes are still rather minuscule for modern CPUs, being kept at the original 21164 sizes of 2 x 8 KB L1 and 96 KB L2, however it has enabled both very small cores and also very, very low cache latencies, down to two clock cycles for L1. You can see the CPU block diagram here.
As mentioned before, 21164 core was the most power efficient of all Alphas, and also one of the most power/performance 64-bit high end CPU cores of all time, excluding the mainstream, entry level or embedded processors. So, the choice of that core for all these years by the Chinese, although they obviously - as the Loongson case shows - had plenty of resources to improve the EV6 or even EV8 cores if they wanted to - seems to prove right at this point. Remember Intel's Knights Corner, or the AMD GCN GPU architecture for compute?
The Knights Corner, being a compute version of the abandoned Larrabee project, uses a core even simpler - and slower - than Alpha 21164, basically a 64-bit version of the old Pentium, enhanced with much higher bandwidth, to act as a feeder to a vector unit behing it that provides very very fast FP. Stick a 50-odd of those on one chip, with the right cache and interconnect in between, and you got a good accelerator. The Compute Units in the AMD 7970 aren't that much different, although they are based on a native optimised architecture, rather than cumbersome X86.
So, in the Shenwei SW3, you have a simple, well proven 4-way (still double the issue of Pentium or Atom per cycle) superscalar in-order core with very small die footprint for today's processes, yet improved and with enhanced bandwidth to feed a simple, AVX-like throughput vector unit. What's the vector unit's speed then? If you normalise the speed to 1 GHz, it'd give you 8 GFLOPs DP per core, or 8 flops per cycle - not bad at all for a 2010 chip using an enhanced 1995 core! All that at very low, below 40 watts (official figures not available) per socket power consumption despite the old 65 nm process.
And, the sustained performance and power consumption in the Sunway Bluelight petaflop system were the proof of the pudding: the water-cooled 9-rack machine has 8,704 ShenWei SW1600 processors (only 8,575 of them ran the Top100 bench at 975 MHz each) organized as 34 Super Nodes (each consisting of 256 compute nodes), 150TB main memory, 2PB external storage, peak performance of 1.07 PFLOPS, sustained performance of 796 TFLOPS, efficiency 74.37%, and total power consumption 1074KW, figures that compare very well against competitive US supercomputer systems such as X86-based Jaguar.
What does the future hold for Shenwei? Well, it can either confinue where the Alpha was stopped, moving to 8-issue cores (even in-order architecture can do it these days since the compiler and scheduling evolved a lot over the past decade) and much faster FP per core, with fresh cache and memory architectures , or just tweak the current core and pack more of them in a single die at higher clock speeds as well, with wider vector units and more memory bandwidth to feed all that, a bit like RISC cousin of Knights Corner, but a true CPU here, instead of just an accelerator. Either can lead to teraflop-on-chip soon too, and either will require a rapid jump in semiconductor process used, down to 32 nm or 28 nm nodes - just like Loongson is expected to do this coming year.
Keep in mind that Alpha left behind a strong software library, not forgetting the Alpha-based Cray T3 system series here as well, and this includes one of the best UNIXes ever, as well as great compilers, optimised libraries, and much more. Coupled with its own software base, China has sufficient resources to confinue developing Shenwei on its own, with sufficient internal market. However, when it decides to go fully commercial with the effort, there will be plenty of interested partners worldwide to embrace the old-new Formula 1 of microprocessors yet again, this time with a far more stable supplier, business wise, than DECompaq was.
The Part 3 will look at the ARM and native CPUs of China.
Read more: Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game - details: Part 2, Alpha by VR-Zone.com
AlphaReported by Nebojsa Novakovic on Monday, December 26 2011 9:03 am Earlier,
we looked at the background of Chinese high end microprocessor effort, as well as the most widely known of them, the Loongson MIPS family. In this second part, we cover Alpha.
Alpha was, for the long time around the turn of the century, the Formula 1 of microprocessors with its very simple, elegant yet extremely scalable RISC architecture focused on raw speed, and pure 64-bitness without any 32-bit modes or compatibility baggage. Between 1993 and 2001, the time of its untimely murder, it owned the majority of performance records, especially when it came to the processor performance - DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) system designers were sometimes too stingy with the memory and I/O systems, allowing other vendors to occassionally win the accolades in those tests. The most well known of those cores, the one that had the highest comparative performance advantage vs the competition, was 21164 a.k.a EV 5 family, which span three semicon process generations - 0.50, 0.35 and 0.25 microns.
The most widely spread volume-wise was the 0.35 micron 21164A in 1996-7, reaching up to 667 MHz, and beating the contemporary 266 MHz Pentium II by over two times in most benchmark tests of the time. The 21164 core, a simple but very high clock-optimised four-issue in-order design with two FP ops per clock, was also the most performance efficient of all Alphas, taking some 25 Watts at 667 MHz vs 75 Watts for the 600 MHz Pentium III 'Katmai' which followed few years later, still at lesser performance. The subsequent Alpha cores, such as 21264 EV6, brought up to double the performance per-clock, however at three times the power consumption per clock, a point very important when looking at the choices made later in this story.
The 21264 out-of order core was also scaled across three processes, including derivatives made by Samsung, the major Alpha architecture licensee. It, and its successor 21364 EV7, carried the performance torch until 2002 or so, well after Alpha's further public development was stopped. Do note the memory and I/O interconnect revolution with the EV7 - while the core was basically the same EV6 type, the on-chip 1.75 MB L2 cache, a 10-channel integrated Rambus memory controller with humongous memory bandwidth basically matching that of the L2 cache and enabling that cache to act as a low latency buffer for the memory system, and four parallel 6.4 GB/s coherent interconnect links to other 4 processors, scaling up to 512 sockets with directory support, were a revolution for year 2000 computing. Such things were only seen in PCs 5 years later with HyperTransport from AMD first, later followed by QPI from Intel. BOTH THESE INTERCONNECTS ARE DERIVED FROM OVER A DECADE-OLD ALPHA EV7.
Add to that more. The 21464 EV8, aimed for release in 2002 if things continued as originally planned, was to be the first processor with eight-issue wide superscalar out-of-order symmetrically multithreaded core, and we mean four threads out of each core here. The 'EV9' 21564 design was expected to add multi-core and huge, wide vector unit - up to 1 KILOBYTE wide - capability to the mix, enabling well over 100 GFLOPS DP floating point performance per core for 2004 timeframe. Remember, we are only now reaching such capabilities in late 2011, and need 6 to 8 cores for that. Anyway, the multithreading and vector enhancements designed well ahead of their time into the EV8 and EV9, never saw the light of the day in the open market.
In the late nineties, China saw the value and capability of Alpha, and built a number of Alpha systems, some of them very large for the time. It also fully licenced the Digital / Tru64 UNIX and related software stack, including getting the full source code, from Compaq after the latter bought DEC then, giving China the critical software control part. At the same time, having seen the business instabilities linked to the Digital-Compaq-HP transition, China seems to have been working on having its own Alpha flavour.
After over a decade of work and three generations of CPUs, Jiangnan Reseach Lab has shown the ShenWei (Sunway) SW-3 processor, the Chinese flavour of Alpha, not in a small workstation, not in a server, but in no less than a huge petaflop-class supercomputer machine in Jinan, Shandong - the Sunway BlueLight MPP, this past October. The CPU itself runs for over a year in a variety of systems, but displaying it running a petaflop machine was probably the best PR one could get, especially since foreign supercomputing dignitaries such as Jack Dongarra, the man behing TOP500 list and Linpack FP benchmark.
SW3 aka SW1600 is a 16-core, 64-bit RISC processor, with each core looking a lot like an improved version of the 21164A EV56 Alpha core, plus vector FP unit extension added to each core. While the initial speed range was 1 to 1.2 GHz in the 65nm process, the standard speed grade is a 1.1 GHz chip with 141 GFLOPs DP FP performance. The speed set for the Bluelight Petaflop machine's Top 500 run was 975 MHz, though. The quad-channel 128-bit DDR3 on-chip memory controller offers 68 GB/s bandwidth - yes, equivalent to 8 channels of DDR3-1066 server RAM.
The L1 and L2 cache sizes are still rather minuscule for modern CPUs, being kept at the original 21164 sizes of 2 x 8 KB L1 and 96 KB L2, however it has enabled both very small cores and also very, very low cache latencies, down to two clock cycles for L1. You can see the CPU block diagram here.
As mentioned before, 21164 core was the most power efficient of all Alphas, and also one of the most power/performance 64-bit high end CPU cores of all time, excluding the mainstream, entry level or embedded processors. So, the choice of that core for all these years by the Chinese, although they obviously - as the Loongson case shows - had plenty of resources to improve the EV6 or even EV8 cores if they wanted to - seems to prove right at this point. Remember Intel's Knights Corner, or the AMD GCN GPU architecture for compute?
The Knights Corner, being a compute version of the abandoned Larrabee project, uses a core even simpler - and slower - than Alpha 21164, basically a 64-bit version of the old Pentium, enhanced with much higher bandwidth, to act as a feeder to a vector unit behing it that provides very very fast FP. Stick a 50-odd of those on one chip, with the right cache and interconnect in between, and you got a good accelerator. The Compute Units in the AMD 7970 aren't that much different, although they are based on a native optimised architecture, rather than cumbersome X86.
So, in the Shenwei SW3, you have a simple, well proven 4-way (still double the issue of Pentium or Atom per cycle) superscalar in-order core with very small die footprint for today's processes, yet improved and with enhanced bandwidth to feed a simple, AVX-like throughput vector unit. What's the vector unit's speed then? If you normalise the speed to 1 GHz, it'd give you 8 GFLOPs DP per core, or 8 flops per cycle - not bad at all for a 2010 chip using an enhanced 1995 core! All that at very low, below 40 watts (official figures not available) per socket power consumption despite the old 65 nm process.
And, the sustained performance and power consumption in the Sunway Bluelight petaflop system were the proof of the pudding: the water-cooled 9-rack machine has 8,704 ShenWei SW1600 processors (only 8,575 of them ran the Top100 bench at 975 MHz each) organized as 34 Super Nodes (each consisting of 256 compute nodes), 150TB main memory, 2PB external storage, peak performance of 1.07 PFLOPS, sustained performance of 796 TFLOPS, efficiency 74.37%, and total power consumption 1074KW, figures that compare very well against competitive US supercomputer systems such as X86-based Jaguar.
What does the future hold for Shenwei? Well, it can either confinue where the Alpha was stopped, moving to 8-issue cores (even in-order architecture can do it these days since the compiler and scheduling evolved a lot over the past decade) and much faster FP per core, with fresh cache and memory architectures , or just tweak the current core and pack more of them in a single die at higher clock speeds as well, with wider vector units and more memory bandwidth to feed all that, a bit like RISC cousin of Knights Corner, but a true CPU here, instead of just an accelerator. Either can lead to teraflop-on-chip soon too, and either will require a rapid jump in semiconductor process used, down to 32 nm or 28 nm nodes - just like Loongson is expected to do this coming year.
Keep in mind that Alpha left behind a strong software library, not forgetting the Alpha-based Cray T3 system series here as well, and this includes one of the best UNIXes ever, as well as great compilers, optimised libraries, and much more. Coupled with its own software base, China has sufficient resources to confinue developing Shenwei on its own, with sufficient internal market. However, when it decides to go fully commercial with the effort, there will be plenty of interested partners worldwide to embrace the old-new Formula 1 of microprocessors yet again, this time with a far more stable supplier, business wise, than DECompaq was.
The Part 3 will look at the ARM and native CPUs of China.
Read more: Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game - details: Part 2, Alpha by VR-Zone.com
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Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game - details: Part 3 - ARM and others
Reported by Nebojsa Novakovic on Monday, December 26 2011 5:55 pm In this final part of the Chinese CPU development coverage, we look at the local ARM processor flavours, as well as China's own instruction set attempts aimed at the general market.
While MIPS and Alpha were at the forefront of RISC high end architecture development, the sole Europe-developed surviving instruction set architecture, ARM, was from the very start in 1985 aimed at the entry level - whether it was the BBC micro home computer successor then, or the myriad of smartphones and netbooks today. The Chinese have embraced ARM architecture as well for this part of the market, with several licenses up to now. These cover the full spectrum of consumer devices, from smartphones and tablets to netbooks, DTV settop boxes and car gadgets.
The Fuzhou-based RockChip offers Cortex A8-based custom ARM CPUs and SoC chips for personal entertainment devices. Their newest RK29xx is the first chip to decode Google's WebM VP8 in hardware. The 1.2 GHz CPU with 512 KB L2 cache also has an integrated 60 million polygons/s GPU as well as DSP-accelerated 1080p playback and encoding in most formats. It supports tablets and smartphones with up to 1280x800 displays. A dual-core version is supposedly under development as well.
The Hangzhou-based NationalChip licensed the ARM over 3 years ago, with specific focus on derivatives for digital entertainment, mainly digital TV sets and set-top boxes. Considered as one of top ten Chinese IC design companies by EETimes China, the company offers GX1100, 1200, 1500, and 3000 families of integrated SoC-approach components for digital entertainment.
Then, the Shanghai-based Leadcore Technology, the chip design arm of Chinese communications equipment company Datang Group, is working on custom ARM processors based on the Cortex-A9 MPCore, the ARM Mali-400 MP graphics core and Cortex-A9 optimization pack for the TSMC 40 nm low power process technology. Their focus is putting together uni and dual-core versions of such chips with its own baseband chip to target high-end smartphones based on the China's 3G standard, TD-SCDMA.
Another Shanghai company, Brite Semiconductor Corp., a fabless startup founded in 2008, has licensed most major ARM processor cores, including Cortex, ARM9, ARM11 and Mali on a long term arrangement. The license also covers Coresight debug and trace technology and peripherals that are compliant with the AMBA on-chip bus. Brite provides design services to electronics companies and works with SMIC, the local foundry, on the manufacturing side. They have already successfully output 40 nm chips from this foundry earlier this year.
Yet another company from 'New New York' of Asia, Shanghai InfoTM Micro-electronics, has licences the ARM11 processor core, Cortex-A5 and Cortex-A9 processor cores and the Mali300 and Mali400 GPUs for 3-D enabled mobile computing devices to be manufactured by Shuoying Digital Science & Technology (China) Co. Ltd. which is its both owner and main customer. They also have multicore ICs ready as of now.
In Zhuhai, AllWinner, focusing on HD media semiconductors, took the ARM Cortex-A8 processor and the Mali-400 MP GPU for their own HD-enabed procssors to be used with a range of Android OS-based tablets, smart TVs, personal media players, eBooks, smart media boxes, IP cameras and automotive multimedia gadgets. The Allwinner Technology SoC designs are available since this past summer.
Finally, we look at the ultimate approach - designing your own instruction set from ground up, a venture few dare to try, especially these days since X86 is pre dominant for the past decade across the board. ICube, a Shenzhen company, created the Harmony Unified Processor Technology, which is supposed to tightly integrate two different processor types, CPU and GPU, into one unified core - sounds somewhat like AMD Fusion approach, but with a fresh instruction set optimised from scratch for the purpose. This technology consists of the Multi-Thread Virtual Pipeline parallel computing core (MVP), an independent instruction set architecture (ISA), an optimizing compiler and the Agile Switch dynamic load balancer.
Even though these are big-named things reminiscent of what you see in servers, ICube's technology is actually used in small SoC solutions for the hand-held computing and communication market, with a focus on the Android OS. The initial product, ICube IC1, is a 600 MHz dual core 32-bit SoC with 8 threads (4 per core) in parallel and 5160 DMIPs declared throughput, a 70 million polygon/s, 600 Mpixel/s GPU, and a host of integrated features such as FullHD display driver up to 1920x1200 with HDMI/DVI, a camera interface, 720p video acceleration, 5.1 audio, memory card, USB, 3G and Wifi connectivity.
What's interesting here is not only the fine grained CPU multithreading with OpenMP and Pthread (both used in HPC and general SMP apps a lot) support , but also the GPU support for Data parallel, Task parallel, and Function parallel computing with minimised interrupt and context switch overhead due to multithreading, and heterogeneous GPGPU applications with both OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenCL support. Each core has 64KB I-Cache , 64KB D-Cache, 64KB SRAM and 32-bit GPR file, 8-channel DMA and 16-source interrupt controller. Each core only takes 3.0 mm2, including memory, with operating power of about 300mw.
The built in support both homogeneous (OpenMP and such) and heterogeneous (OpenCL and such) parallel programming APIs through native compiler and MVP drivers is quite a good news here, as a new ISA needs the easiest possible programming enablement to ensure software support.
In summary, China is covering the ground well at the mainstream level as well, ensuring a well varied supply of CPUs for all classes of consumer devices, having ARM compatibility yet local cost, design and manufacturing control. At the same time, going for its own instruction sets is the next frontier.
Read more: Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game - details: Part 3 - ARM and others by VR-Zone.com
Reported by Nebojsa Novakovic on Monday, December 26 2011 5:55 pm In this final part of the Chinese CPU development coverage, we look at the local ARM processor flavours, as well as China's own instruction set attempts aimed at the general market.
While MIPS and Alpha were at the forefront of RISC high end architecture development, the sole Europe-developed surviving instruction set architecture, ARM, was from the very start in 1985 aimed at the entry level - whether it was the BBC micro home computer successor then, or the myriad of smartphones and netbooks today. The Chinese have embraced ARM architecture as well for this part of the market, with several licenses up to now. These cover the full spectrum of consumer devices, from smartphones and tablets to netbooks, DTV settop boxes and car gadgets.
The Fuzhou-based RockChip offers Cortex A8-based custom ARM CPUs and SoC chips for personal entertainment devices. Their newest RK29xx is the first chip to decode Google's WebM VP8 in hardware. The 1.2 GHz CPU with 512 KB L2 cache also has an integrated 60 million polygons/s GPU as well as DSP-accelerated 1080p playback and encoding in most formats. It supports tablets and smartphones with up to 1280x800 displays. A dual-core version is supposedly under development as well.
The Hangzhou-based NationalChip licensed the ARM over 3 years ago, with specific focus on derivatives for digital entertainment, mainly digital TV sets and set-top boxes. Considered as one of top ten Chinese IC design companies by EETimes China, the company offers GX1100, 1200, 1500, and 3000 families of integrated SoC-approach components for digital entertainment.
Then, the Shanghai-based Leadcore Technology, the chip design arm of Chinese communications equipment company Datang Group, is working on custom ARM processors based on the Cortex-A9 MPCore, the ARM Mali-400 MP graphics core and Cortex-A9 optimization pack for the TSMC 40 nm low power process technology. Their focus is putting together uni and dual-core versions of such chips with its own baseband chip to target high-end smartphones based on the China's 3G standard, TD-SCDMA.
Another Shanghai company, Brite Semiconductor Corp., a fabless startup founded in 2008, has licensed most major ARM processor cores, including Cortex, ARM9, ARM11 and Mali on a long term arrangement. The license also covers Coresight debug and trace technology and peripherals that are compliant with the AMBA on-chip bus. Brite provides design services to electronics companies and works with SMIC, the local foundry, on the manufacturing side. They have already successfully output 40 nm chips from this foundry earlier this year.
Yet another company from 'New New York' of Asia, Shanghai InfoTM Micro-electronics, has licences the ARM11 processor core, Cortex-A5 and Cortex-A9 processor cores and the Mali300 and Mali400 GPUs for 3-D enabled mobile computing devices to be manufactured by Shuoying Digital Science & Technology (China) Co. Ltd. which is its both owner and main customer. They also have multicore ICs ready as of now.
In Zhuhai, AllWinner, focusing on HD media semiconductors, took the ARM Cortex-A8 processor and the Mali-400 MP GPU for their own HD-enabed procssors to be used with a range of Android OS-based tablets, smart TVs, personal media players, eBooks, smart media boxes, IP cameras and automotive multimedia gadgets. The Allwinner Technology SoC designs are available since this past summer.
Finally, we look at the ultimate approach - designing your own instruction set from ground up, a venture few dare to try, especially these days since X86 is pre dominant for the past decade across the board. ICube, a Shenzhen company, created the Harmony Unified Processor Technology, which is supposed to tightly integrate two different processor types, CPU and GPU, into one unified core - sounds somewhat like AMD Fusion approach, but with a fresh instruction set optimised from scratch for the purpose. This technology consists of the Multi-Thread Virtual Pipeline parallel computing core (MVP), an independent instruction set architecture (ISA), an optimizing compiler and the Agile Switch dynamic load balancer.
Even though these are big-named things reminiscent of what you see in servers, ICube's technology is actually used in small SoC solutions for the hand-held computing and communication market, with a focus on the Android OS. The initial product, ICube IC1, is a 600 MHz dual core 32-bit SoC with 8 threads (4 per core) in parallel and 5160 DMIPs declared throughput, a 70 million polygon/s, 600 Mpixel/s GPU, and a host of integrated features such as FullHD display driver up to 1920x1200 with HDMI/DVI, a camera interface, 720p video acceleration, 5.1 audio, memory card, USB, 3G and Wifi connectivity.
What's interesting here is not only the fine grained CPU multithreading with OpenMP and Pthread (both used in HPC and general SMP apps a lot) support , but also the GPU support for Data parallel, Task parallel, and Function parallel computing with minimised interrupt and context switch overhead due to multithreading, and heterogeneous GPGPU applications with both OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenCL support. Each core has 64KB I-Cache , 64KB D-Cache, 64KB SRAM and 32-bit GPR file, 8-channel DMA and 16-source interrupt controller. Each core only takes 3.0 mm2, including memory, with operating power of about 300mw.
The built in support both homogeneous (OpenMP and such) and heterogeneous (OpenCL and such) parallel programming APIs through native compiler and MVP drivers is quite a good news here, as a new ISA needs the easiest possible programming enablement to ensure software support.
In summary, China is covering the ground well at the mainstream level as well, ensuring a well varied supply of CPUs for all classes of consumer devices, having ARM compatibility yet local cost, design and manufacturing control. At the same time, going for its own instruction sets is the next frontier.
Read more: Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game - details: Part 3 - ARM and others by VR-Zone.com
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China Has Homemade Supercomputer Gain
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: October 28, 2011
The announcement was made this week at a technical meeting held in Jinan, China, organized by industry and government organizations. The new machine, the Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province in eastern China.
The Sunway system, which can perform about 1,000 trillion calculations per second — a petaflop — will probably rank among the 20 fastest computers in the world. More significantly, it is composed of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, designed at a Chinese computer institute and manufactured in Shanghai.
Currently, the Chinese are about three generations behind the state-of-art chip making technologies used by world leaders such as the United States, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
“This is a bit of a surprise,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee and a leader of the Top500 project, a list of the world’s fastest computers.
Last fall, another Chinese-based supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, created an international sensation when it was briefly ranked as the world’s fastest, before it was displaced in the spring by a rival Japanese machine, the K Computer, designed by Fujitsu. But the Tianhe was built from processor chips made by American companies, Intel and Nvidia, though its internal switching system was designed by Chinese engineers. Similarly, the K computer was based on Sparc chips, originally designed at Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley.
Dr. Dongarra said the Sunway’s theoretical peak performance was about 74 percent as fast as the fastest United States computer — the Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, made by Cray Inc. That machine is currently the third fastest on the list.
The Energy Department is planning three supercomputers that would run at 10 to 20 petaflops. And the United States is embarking on an effort to reach an exaflop, or one million trillion mathematical operations in a second, sometime before the end of the decade, though most computer scientists say the necessary technologies do not yet exist.
To build such a computer from existing components would require immense amounts of electricity — roughly the amount produced by a medium-size nuclear power plant. In contrast, Dr. Dongarra said it was intriguing that the power requirements of the new Chinese supercomputer were relatively modest — about one megawatt, according to reports from the technical conference. The Tianhe supercomputer consumes about four megawatts and the Jaguar about seven.
The ShenWei microprocessor appears to be based on some of the same design principles that are favored by Intel’s most advanced microprocessors, according to several supercomputer experts in the United States.
But there is disagreement over whether the machine’s cooling technology is appropriate for designs that will be required by the exaflop-class supercomputers of the future.
Photos of the new Sunway supercomputer reveal an elaborate water-cooling system that may be a significant advance in the design of the very fastest machines. “Getting this cooling technology correct is very, very difficult,” said Steven Wallach, chief scientist at Convey Computer, a Richardson, Tex., supercomputer firm. “This tells me that this is a serious design. This cooling technology could scale to exaflop. They are in the hunt to win.”
A version of this article appeared in print on October 29, 2011, on page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: China Has Homemade Supercomputer Gain, With Own Chips.
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: October 28, 2011
The announcement was made this week at a technical meeting held in Jinan, China, organized by industry and government organizations. The new machine, the Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province in eastern China.
The Sunway system, which can perform about 1,000 trillion calculations per second — a petaflop — will probably rank among the 20 fastest computers in the world. More significantly, it is composed of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, designed at a Chinese computer institute and manufactured in Shanghai.
Currently, the Chinese are about three generations behind the state-of-art chip making technologies used by world leaders such as the United States, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
“This is a bit of a surprise,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee and a leader of the Top500 project, a list of the world’s fastest computers.
Last fall, another Chinese-based supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, created an international sensation when it was briefly ranked as the world’s fastest, before it was displaced in the spring by a rival Japanese machine, the K Computer, designed by Fujitsu. But the Tianhe was built from processor chips made by American companies, Intel and Nvidia, though its internal switching system was designed by Chinese engineers. Similarly, the K computer was based on Sparc chips, originally designed at Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley.
Dr. Dongarra said the Sunway’s theoretical peak performance was about 74 percent as fast as the fastest United States computer — the Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, made by Cray Inc. That machine is currently the third fastest on the list.
The Energy Department is planning three supercomputers that would run at 10 to 20 petaflops. And the United States is embarking on an effort to reach an exaflop, or one million trillion mathematical operations in a second, sometime before the end of the decade, though most computer scientists say the necessary technologies do not yet exist.
To build such a computer from existing components would require immense amounts of electricity — roughly the amount produced by a medium-size nuclear power plant. In contrast, Dr. Dongarra said it was intriguing that the power requirements of the new Chinese supercomputer were relatively modest — about one megawatt, according to reports from the technical conference. The Tianhe supercomputer consumes about four megawatts and the Jaguar about seven.
The ShenWei microprocessor appears to be based on some of the same design principles that are favored by Intel’s most advanced microprocessors, according to several supercomputer experts in the United States.
But there is disagreement over whether the machine’s cooling technology is appropriate for designs that will be required by the exaflop-class supercomputers of the future.
Photos of the new Sunway supercomputer reveal an elaborate water-cooling system that may be a significant advance in the design of the very fastest machines. “Getting this cooling technology correct is very, very difficult,” said Steven Wallach, chief scientist at Convey Computer, a Richardson, Tex., supercomputer firm. “This tells me that this is a serious design. This cooling technology could scale to exaflop. They are in the hunt to win.”
A version of this article appeared in print on October 29, 2011, on page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: China Has Homemade Supercomputer Gain, With Own Chips.
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Last updated: October 24, 2012 6:29 pm
China to restart nuclear programme
By Leslie Hook in Beijing
China has restarted its nuclear programme after a year-and-a-half hiatus, but said it would build “only a few” new nuclear power plants between now and 2015 as it implemented radical new safety standards.
Beijing suspended approvals for new nuclear projects in March last year, following the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan, and undertook a big review of its nuclear safety practices.
China to restart nuclear programme - FT.com
China to restart nuclear programme
By Leslie Hook in Beijing
China has restarted its nuclear programme after a year-and-a-half hiatus, but said it would build “only a few” new nuclear power plants between now and 2015 as it implemented radical new safety standards.
Beijing suspended approvals for new nuclear projects in March last year, following the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan, and undertook a big review of its nuclear safety practices.
China to restart nuclear programme - FT.com
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Weather satellites to analyze the skies
Updated: 2012-10-24 21:02
By WANG QIAN ( chinadaily.com.cn)
China plans to launch 11 weather satellites by 2020 to better analyze the climate, monitor natural hazards and forecast weather, according to a national meteorological satellite development plan.
The plan, released on Wednesday by the China Meteorological Administration, states that about 22 billion yuan ($3.4 billion) will be invested into the satellite program.
“The program will largely improve the country’s weather forecast capacity and reduce economic losses caused by extreme weather events,” said Yang Jun, director of the National Satellite Meteorological Center.
He said all 11 satellites are operational and experimental satellites will also be launched, but there are no details available on the number of experimental satellites.
According to the plan, from 2012 to 2020 China will launch one weather satellite every year, except in 2012 and 2019, when it will launch two. The satellites launched in 2019 will include one to monitor precipitation.
“The precipitation-monitoring satellite will help the country avoid the sort of damage caused by rainstorms, like what Beijing residents experienced in July,” Yang said.
Devastating floods caused by torrential rain claimed 79 lives in the capital on July 21.
Frequent natural disasters and growing environmental awareness has led to increasing demand for weather data, such as PM2.5, meaning particulate matter in the air that is smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, Yang said.
Li Qing, an engineer at the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, said the coming 10 years will be a peak period for the country’s development of weather satellite technology.
China is accelerating its pace of research and development in satellite technologies and broadening international cooperation.
The China Meteorological Administration and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites in Germany has shared data from FY-3B, a Chinese polar-orbiting satellite, available to users in Europe and beyond, since January.
The country will also have talks with countries including the United States and Canada on research and development of the satellite design and data processing to boost China’s satellite development, according to the plan.
China has launched 12 weather satellites in the Fengyun series since 1988, including six satellites in polar orbits and six in geosynchronous orbit. Currently there are seven weather satellites in operation.
Although 11 additional satellites will be in operation by 2020, Yang is not satisfied, and said the more weather satellites launched, the more reliable can the weather forecast be.
Weather satellites to analyze the skies |Sci-Tech |chinadaily.com.cn
Updated: 2012-10-24 21:02
By WANG QIAN ( chinadaily.com.cn)
China plans to launch 11 weather satellites by 2020 to better analyze the climate, monitor natural hazards and forecast weather, according to a national meteorological satellite development plan.
The plan, released on Wednesday by the China Meteorological Administration, states that about 22 billion yuan ($3.4 billion) will be invested into the satellite program.
“The program will largely improve the country’s weather forecast capacity and reduce economic losses caused by extreme weather events,” said Yang Jun, director of the National Satellite Meteorological Center.
He said all 11 satellites are operational and experimental satellites will also be launched, but there are no details available on the number of experimental satellites.
According to the plan, from 2012 to 2020 China will launch one weather satellite every year, except in 2012 and 2019, when it will launch two. The satellites launched in 2019 will include one to monitor precipitation.
“The precipitation-monitoring satellite will help the country avoid the sort of damage caused by rainstorms, like what Beijing residents experienced in July,” Yang said.
Devastating floods caused by torrential rain claimed 79 lives in the capital on July 21.
Frequent natural disasters and growing environmental awareness has led to increasing demand for weather data, such as PM2.5, meaning particulate matter in the air that is smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, Yang said.
Li Qing, an engineer at the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, said the coming 10 years will be a peak period for the country’s development of weather satellite technology.
China is accelerating its pace of research and development in satellite technologies and broadening international cooperation.
The China Meteorological Administration and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites in Germany has shared data from FY-3B, a Chinese polar-orbiting satellite, available to users in Europe and beyond, since January.
The country will also have talks with countries including the United States and Canada on research and development of the satellite design and data processing to boost China’s satellite development, according to the plan.
China has launched 12 weather satellites in the Fengyun series since 1988, including six satellites in polar orbits and six in geosynchronous orbit. Currently there are seven weather satellites in operation.
Although 11 additional satellites will be in operation by 2020, Yang is not satisfied, and said the more weather satellites launched, the more reliable can the weather forecast be.
Weather satellites to analyze the skies |Sci-Tech |chinadaily.com.cn
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