China goes ahead with national processor architecture

Now, the news, also referred to in the US press (source http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4371529/China-mulls-national-IC-architecture-spec ) is that there was a top level meeting last month at their Ministry of Industry and IT to start the selection process for their own National CPU Architecture choice, meaning an instruction set, first and foremost. Cutting off the licenses and national security come up as possible reasons too. And no, that most likely doesn't mean a processor instruction set with instructions written in Chinese language, huh.

This is a big one, because it means that, among at least five instruction sets to choose that are locally further developed, one would become the preferred one. Basically, we got MIPS in Loongson and Ingeniq, covering all from smartphone to supercomputer; then 'Shenwei' Alpha, mostly for military-linked workstation, servers, supercomputers and such; 'Fengtian' SPARC in the same fields as Alpha; Icube UPU integrated CPU-GPU for mobile and microserver markets, and over a dozen ARM licensees.