China released second generation MIPS microprocessor. I feel a little bit funny about the wording of “unauthorized and unlicensed” in that piece of news. Isn’t the MIPS instruction set an open standard and very well documented even in text books for undergraduate kids like Computer Organization and Design? The MIPS instruction set is not overwhelmingly complex. In fact, beautifully simple and elegant. No wonder the Chinese company BLX CPU chose to implement the MIPS architecture but not follow Intel’s for now.
I had a look at the BLX CPU’s homepage. Currently there is no English version. I try to translate some information from this source :
China has the aspiration of developing her own high-performance CPU for long. The dream comes true today. Today the Godson-2 is released. This CPU is independently developed by China. The test result by SPEC CPU 2000 proves that the performance of Godson-2 has already reached the same level of Intel Pentium III’s. It’s 10 times as performant as Godson-1.
…
The business goal of Godson-2 is to reduce the price of PC in China to less than 125 dollars
…
Godson-2 is the first 64-bit, general purpose CPU developed in China. It supports the OS of Linux-64 and X-Windows system. Targeted application fields are Linux desktop, Linux network terminals, low-end application servers, firewall, router….
…
Godson-3 is under development. Godson-3 will use a four-core architecture …
Some Chinese people are worrying about the Godson chips cannot run M$ Windows applications. As a Linux user for a while I say with confidence that it should not be a problem. There are excellent Windows emulators for Linux out there. My Wine can make M$ Office run on my SuSE box without problem. But nowadays there are OpenOffice and StarOffice, they are real alternatives to M$ Office; GIMP is a good alternative to Photoshop; Acrobat Reader has a very good Linux version; With proper codecs installed, MPlayer or Xine can play almost any format of media files, one doesn’t really need Windows Media Player or RealPlayer or QuickTime; Firefox outperforms IE; The look and feel of KDE and GNOME are not aesthetically worse than Windows or Mac’s OS X, if not cooler or prettier; Gaim or Gabber are universal chat clients, one would have no problem to keep friends online; Some VoIP applications are already well implemented for Linux; Apache runs better under Linux….Anyway people can live well without M$ Windows. So I personally think the “China’s second gerneration MIPS 64 for Linux only” should not be viewed as a problem and with certain help from the government, “Linux only” should not be the bottle neck of its marketing.
Personally I’m happy to hear about the release of Chinese MIPS 64. 
A ha! Found several interesting comments on this news from slashdot.org:
….
While R10000 was not a bad CPU, I would expect “Godson” to be considerably better. It should consume less and scale to higher frequencies. China has manufacturing capability on 150nm (and possibly less) which was not available to anyone in 1995. (by arivanov)
When I clicked on this story… it said:
“Nothing to see for you here. Move along.”
Exactly what the Chinese textbooks will say about this. “IN the year 2005 China invented a brand new COMPUTER CHIP technology. American spies stole the designs for this chip and also the TOP SECRET designs for a time machine device, and went back to 1995 to create a company called MIPS.” (by Tezkah)
. This is pretty well-educated manner. 
MIPS is dead, anyway.
If MIPS cannot make its own chips live longer, then it’s definitely a good thing that chinese copy it “illegally” and find a usage as embedded consumer processors. MIPS had its 15 minutes, now it’s over, they should be grateful that at least their architecture is still used for some obscure stuff. (by Ray Alloc)
A brief description with picture of the chip [pconline.com.cn]
A 13-page write-up documenting the tough work and challenges faced by one of the chip scientists (e.g. pipelines/branch-prediction/cache design, packaging, etc…) [pconline.com.cn]
Interesting bits from those Chinese sites:
- (back in 2003) they’re already running Linux on it, with applications such as MP3 audio/mpeg movie playing, Mozilla, OpenOffice, games…
- (back in 2003) Max clock 300MHz, 1-2W power consumption, 1% CPU load for playing MP3, 23% for mpeg movie, SPEC_CPU2000 score of 300
- will reach 1GHz by early 2006
- it will be used in low-cost PC with price RMB1,000
- the 3rd gen of the chip will incorporate multi-core design
(by Joseph Lam)
It took me 40 minutes to read the 13-page long story, skipped much technical stuff which I don’t really understand. Deeply touched. I know the average salary level of the scientists (I mean those who really do R&D in the labs, not those terribly rich “scientists” who own several private companies but only good at bragging….) in China. I know their average working condition and living condition (The computers in our lab for undergraduate kids are far better than computers for some top professors in China; While here many Abitur kids drive their own cars, many young Ph.Ds in the Godson lab still have to go to work by buses….). Through the 13-page long highly emotional and highly technical story, I saw something spiritual: pure enthusiasm toward the honour of our old, imperfect country and pure passion towards technology. In such an era there still exists story like that, I am deeply moved. The R&D team of the Godson chips is adorable, though the chip itself might not really.
39 years old 
In such occasion, one hears something brisk if lucky enough, hears something like scratching on glass if unlucky.