China hits back at chip copying accusation

See China's Godson-2 CPU is a MIPS rip chip.

Hu Weiwu, the principal in developing Mr Godson, said according to a report in the People's Daily that it was "totally inappropriate" to charge the Chinese Academy of Sciences with intellectual property infringement.

Analyst firm In-Stat had said that the chip was 95 per cent compatible with MIPS products, but Hu used an interesting argument to resist the suggestion.

The Daily quoted him as saying MIPS and the CAS built two different flats with two bedrooms each facing in the same direction. That didn't mean one building was copying another.

He added that many well known brands had 95 per cent similarity, and MIPS "reportoire" has 12 "unaligned" memory access instructions.

While In-Stat's assessment of the Godson 2 was "mostly objective", the content "was distorted by a few irresponsible mass media outlets".

In-Stat said in its report, send to the INQ on the 25th of July: "The Godson architecture is a close imitation of the MIPS architecture and is about 95% MIPS compatible. The Godson-2 is similar to the MIPS R10000, introduced in 1995. These similarities could raise some controversial intellectual-property issues, because MIPS Technologies has no connection with Godson and hasn't licensed any technology to the Godson designers."

Ah, we see, we see. µ

People's Daily
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