China's "soaring dragon" Linux chip "fully MIPS compatible"

WE DON'T GET invited to chip bashes at the Chinese embassy, unfortunately, so missed an important missive the diplomatic press release service issued nearly a year back on the "Dragon Chip" the People's Daily wrote about last Friday and which we also wrote about, here.

A statement from the Chinese Embassy on the 13th of October a year ago gives more details of the "Dragon Chip", which appears to have fully MIPS like characteristics - although obviously MIPS would know more about that than the INQ.

According to the statement from the Chinese Institute of Computation Sciences, part of the Academy of Sciences, the "dragon chip" is "equivalent to the performance of the Intel 486".

It has "six million and more crystal tubes" (transistors - but crystal tube is a nice phrase) and can act on "250 and more commands" - that is to say instructions.

It also has "landed innovations for system security," is "fully compatible with MIPS chips", still used in Tandem machines even to this day, and can operate under the Linux 2.4 kernel and in X Windows environments.

The statement adds: "It has passed a series of performance tests and had its chip logic design verified for its correctness. Thanks to its binary coding and decoding system developed independently, the chip is able to work on PC programs."

And it continues: "It is reported that the Institute is planning to start the production of the said chips next year and expecting to work out CPU chips for commercial applications within one year. Chinese scientists are planning to develop the chips equivalent to Pentium III in 2003 and make them reach the then internationally advanced level in 2005." µ

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