Chinese Chip Closes In on Intel, AMD

China may finally have a processor to power a homegrown supercomputer.

 Chip challenger: Lemote is one of a handful of companies manufacturing Loongson-powered Netbooks, mostly for the Chinese market.
At this year's Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, Weiwu Hu, the lead architect of the "national processor" of China, revealed three new chip designs. One of them could enable China to build a homegrown supercomputer to rank in a prestigious list of the world's fastest machines.
The Loongson processor family (known in China by the name Godson), is now in its sixth generation. The latest designs consist of the one-gigahertz, eight-core Godson 3B, the more powerful 16-core, Godson 3C (with a speed that is currently unknown), and the smaller, lower-power one-gigahertz Godson 2H, intended for netbooks and other mobile devices. The Godson 3B will be commercially available in 2011, as will the Godson 2H, but the Godson 3C won't debut until 2012.
According to Tom Halfhill, industry analyst and editor of Microprocessor Report, the eight-core Godson 3B will still be significantly less powerful than Intel's best chip, the six-core Xeon processor. It will be able to perform roughly 30 percent fewer mathematical calculations per second. Intel's forthcoming Sandy Bridge processor and AMD's Bulldozer processor will widen the gap between chips designed by American companies and the Godson 3B.
However, China's chip-making capabilities are improving quickly. Intel's Xeon processor uses a 32-nanometer process (meaning the smallest components can be formed on this scale), while the Godson 3B uses 65 nanometers, leading to significantly slower processing speeds. But the Godson 3C processor will leapfrog current technology by using a 28-nanometer process, although this will only increase its clock speed by about a factor of two, estimates Halfhill. With its eight additional cores, this should make the 3C about four times as fast as the Godson 3B.
Hu, lead architect of the Godson project, said via e-mail that China's Dawning 6000 supercomputer, originally slated for completion in mid-2010, will instead debut in 2011, using the Godson 3B. Halfhill calculates that the Dawning supercomputer will use CPUs that are slower than fastest Intel chips. However, it could still rank on the Top 500 list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world--a significant coup for China's fledgling electronics industry. "Just getting into the Top 500 with a native processor is a worthy accomplishment," says Halfhill.
The Loongson processor is based on the MIPS instruction set, the basic commands that a microprocessor understands. In contrast, Intel and AMD processors are based on the x86 instruction set. Engineers at China's Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) have added more than 300 instructions to the MIPS instruction set in the latest generation of the Loongson processor, and most are devoted to vector processing, a technique for processing data in parallel that can speed operations like graphics and scientific processing. The Dawning 6000 would mark the first time a MIPS-based supercomputer has appeared in the Top 500 list since 2004.
The ongoing development of the Loongson processor family is good news for Stanford-based MIPS Technologies, which licenses the MIPS instruction set and competes with the x86, ARM, and IBM Power architectures. "It's our view that the ICT team and the MIPS instruction set are in a leading position for the [Chinese] government-driven national processor effort," says Art Swift, vice president of marketing at MIPS.
At the low end of the Godson family of processors, the new 2H chip is an incremental improvement compared to previous chips in the Godson 2 series, says Halfhill. According to Hu, the chip is designed for netbooks, other mobile devices, low-powered PCs and embedded systems.

 

An important factor for the Godson 2 series has been the porting of Google's Android operating system (used in smart phones, and in some tablets and netbooks) to the MIPS instruction set, says Swift, who adds that ICT engineers were very active in that effort. "The uptake of Android in China was phenomenal; they were way ahead of everyone else, and the whole rest of the field has followed," Swift says.
Hu has emphasized in the past that a primary goal of ICT's "national processor" effort is the creation of an affordable chip that can help bring China out of the industrial age and into the information age.
"I think what they're really after is a national processor that is broadly used and displaces the Intel monopoly," says Swift.
Displacing the Intel monopoly does not necessarily mean displacing the Windows monopoly, however. Despite ICT's emphasis on Android and open-source software, the Loongson family includes many instructions designed to speed up emulation of the x86 instruction set, and the Microsoft architecture team attended Hu's presentation at Hot Chips, according to Swift. "I wouldn't rule out this being a great Windows processor at some point," he says.
The Loongson family of processors may, however, face a fundamental challenge to its ability to compete with other architectures in terms of performance.
The Godson processor appears to have been designed primarily with automated circuit design tools, which is common throughout the microprocessor industry, but the processor has not been manually tweaked by engineers, which is not. This could mean unnecessary bottlenecks in the flow of data through the processor. "That's always been a puzzle to me," says Halfhill. "It's not like there is a shortage of circuit designers in China."
One of the most unexpected surprises of the Hot Chips presentation was the acknowledgement that if ICT's current fabrication partner, STMicro, is unable to produce the Godson 3C in a 28-nanometer process by 2011, production could be moved to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Historically, China and Taiwan have had chilly political relations even as their economic interdependence has increased.
Government support for ICT's national processor project was reaffirmed Monday when it was announced that the chip will be part of the country's 12th Five-Year Plan. If the Godson 3B shows up in a supercomputer by 2011, it will be an important milestone in China's billion-dollar effort to cultivate a homegrown CPU.

A Flexible Color Display

HP is testing a display that could appear in future color e-readers and tablet computers.

Researchers at HP Labs are testing a flexible, full-color display that saves power by reflecting ambient light instead of using a backlight. The prototype display's pixels are controlled by fast-switching silicon transistors printed on top of plastic. If the technology can be commercialized, the display will compete with liquid crystal screens as well as other low-power color flexible displays in the works.

Reflective color: This prototype display uses stacks of red, blue, and green dyes and electrically controlled mirrors to produce color images without the need for a backlight.
Credit: HP Labs 

"Our goal is to make a display with the color saturation of newsprint that can be manufactured for about $10 per square foot," says Carl Taussig, director of the Information Surfaces Lab at HP's Palo Alto, CA, research center. At this price, reflective color displays could replace paper for applications such as signs and billboards, Taussig says, although he estimates that this will take a year or two at least.
HP is collaborating with Phicot, a subsidiary of Ames, IA-based Powerfilm, which prints high-performance transistors on plastic. HP plans to target both the e-reader and tablet PC markets.
The e-reader screen market is dominated by E-Ink, a company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes black-and-white reflective displays incorporating tiny microcapsules. E-Ink's screens have the look of paper, do not need a backlight, and do not require any power once the pixels have switched between black and white. But it is also too slow to show video and, as yet, is only available in black and white.
In contrast, Apple's iPad uses a more conventional liquid crystal display. This means it produces vibrant color, but it is also expensive, power-hungry, and vulnerable to glare. The display is also relatively fragile because it's built on top of glass. Many manufacturers believe there is still a market for low-power reflective displays.
Flexible display manufacturers are watching how consumers respond to the iPad. But they're also working to develop robust reflective displays built on plastic that use less battery life without giving up the functionality of LCDs.
"Color will make all the difference," says Nick Colaneri, director of the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University, which partners with most of the major display manufacturers on technology development. Without color, reflective displays will be limited to niche markets, he says. Using plastic transistor arrays, which promise better durability, will also be key, he says, although major manufacturing challenges remain.
"The first company to get one of these out will have a strong position, but at the end of the day it comes down to cost," Colaneri says. "There are several radically different approaches to manufacturing, and it's too early to say what the costs will be."

E-Ink is developing its own color technology, which uses side-by-side red, blue, and green filters. This means that, at any given time, each pixel might only be reflecting light from one third of its total area, which can compromise the brightness of the display.
HP hopes to deliver a brighter color reflective display technology by stacking red, green, and blue pixels in the same area. "If you want to show red, you can make the entire display red," says Taussig.
The challenge in stacking pixels is that light is lost as it travels into and out of the stack display. "If you get loss at each layer, you get a huge overall loss, so we're engineering the light path to prevent that," says Taussig. HP's best approach so far is to stack layers of red, green, and blue dye between electrically active mirrors that control whether or not light passes through each layer.
"The drawback is that it's complicated," says Taussig. With every layer that must be added during manufacturing, there's more potential for errors. So the company is also developing a single-layer multicolor reflective display that uses luminescent materials to harvest light and convert it into different colors, which are then re-emitted.
A potential advantage for HP is its association with Phicot, which already makes high-performance display backplanes by printing silicon on plastic using a roll-to-roll process. "We've got to get the glass out of there," Colaneri says.
Korean display company LG and Taiwanese company Prime View International are also printing silicon transistors on top of flexible materials, and both these companies have promised fully flexible displays in the coming year.
"Phicot's approach is completely different," says Colaneri. Instead of going through multiple rounds of etching to create a transistor array, which entails multiple opportunities for error, Phicot uses a single-step, three-dimensional lithography technique. Eliminating manufacturing steps is particularly important when working with plastic: if it bends or warps during the printing process, the layers won't line up with one another. If HP can clear these and other manufacturing hurdles, its reflective display technology could be appearing soon on a billboard near you.