But demand may be low. China has funded work on the Godson line of chips since 2001 to create a low-cost alternative to CPUs controlled by foreign firms. Godson chips power products from firewall appliances to off-brand laptops running Linux, but sales have never taken off. The chips have a MIPS core that is incompatible with the x86 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices that are used in most PCs. Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite run on x86 processors, not MIPS ones.
Chinese supercomputer to use Godson processor
Posted on Wednesday, May 06 2009 @ 2:25 CEST by Thomas De MaesschalckYahoo News writes a government-backed Chinese firm will reveal a supercomputer prototype with blade servers that use the Chinese Godson processor. The system will offer a petaflop of computing power and is expected to be revealed in September.
