China Expects to Compete with Intel, in 20 Years

News
By Douglas Perry
published

China, which recently ascended to the top of the world's supercomputer powers, said that, by the end of this year, it will not be using foreign processors for its future supercomputers anymore.

Instead, the country intends to rely on its own Loongson series of processing cores.

The upcoming Dawning 6000 supercomputer is expected to use 10,000 of these chips to achieve an estimated 1 Petaflop of processing performance. While it is a national priority to use its own processors, scientists admitted that it is difficult at this time to exploit the full potential of the chips as there aren't programmers who can squeeze every bit of horsepower out of them.

China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer, currently the world's fastest supercomputer, uses a total of 186,368 cores and achieves a peak performance of 4.7 PFlops. The systems uses Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs as well as Nvidia Tesla GPUs.  

China expects that it will take at least 10 years until the chips will be able to supply the domestic market. In 20 years, China wants to compete with companies such as Intel here in the U.S.      

Douglas Perry
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113 Comments Comment from the forums
  • I'd suspect that these computers utilizing Chinese-made cpus will probably fail constantly. :)
    Reply
  • atminside
    cool, that means intel prices will drop
    Reply
  • pelov
    aaron11I'd suspect that these computers utilizing Chinese-made cpus will probably fail constantly.
    The plastic that it's made from will fall apart and crumble.
    Reply
  • someguynamedmatt
    ...yeah. Good luck with your junk, China.
    Reply
  • 20 years is like a century in tech terms, when china says they going be competitive is that with current chips or future chips
    Reply
  • duk3
    I wonder if they will encourage their own citizens to create CPUs in their backyards. It worked out for smelting steel, right? Oh wait I guess not...
    Reply
  • sonofliberty08
    haha ...... maybe they can just buy out the foreign processor company , then it is not using foreign processor anymore :p
    Reply
  • 11796pcs
    Hmm, look what AMD was producing in 1991 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am386
    I think this is a legitimate threat though. All China has to do is reverse-engineer all of the processors on the market and they're in business. What I believe China will do is undercut Intel and AMD by making extremely cheap low-performance processors that will ruin Intel and AMD's foothold in the normal non-entusiast market (ex. my parents who don't know anything about computers and would just buy the cheapest thing out there). This can only mean bad because as China starts pulling the rug out from underneath Intel and AMD they will pull their focus away from high-end processors and try to battle China (a battle they will inevitably lose because 1. They aren't countries and 2. They won't be able to sell products as cheap). The next 20 years will be a very interesting time in history in which I will be looking at through my fingers.
    Reply
  • alidan
    here is the better question. why?

    its probably going to cost close to 50billion to 100billion over the next 10 years to make a competitive (the same way amd is competitive to intel, they are close, and may be better in some areas but not over taking them) processor, and even than probably another 10 years and minimum 25billion to match intel, and probably even more time and money to over take them, ASSUMING they can buy the title of number 1 processor.

    i see little point in doing this, other than to p@## away money.
    Reply
  • liveonc
    Please Appreciate 1 billion Chinese buying these things (because they're forced to) & "think" about it...
    Reply