Chinese scientists announced October 13 that they have succeeded in developing the first China-made, all-purpose, high-performance central processing unit (CPU) Godson chip, and planned to produce "Pentium II" chip equivalent in a year's time in filling in the country's blank to that end.

Jiang Mianheng, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, hailed the technological breakthrough as a great achievement.

The technical know-how, which is of intellectual property of our own, will accelerate the development of China's IT industry and helps to ensure safety of state network information system.

China still depends so far on foreign manufactures for some key components such as CPU and operation system. Although the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) developed Red Flag Linux operation system not long ago, it needs years to apply it widely on the market and gradually replace Microsoft's Windows system.

At the beginning of this year, CAS worked out China's most powerful server, Dawning 3000, which has a peak floating speed of 403.2 billion times per second but it contains IBM CPU chips.

The Godson chip can still be improved in performance and it is similar to the chip used in personal computer 486, says the 35-year-old professor Tang Zhimin, who led a group of experts to develop the Godson chip.

They plan to use Godson to make high-performance servers to be used on computer networks in two or three years, and five years later it would appear on desktop PCs that use home-made CPU chips and operation system, Tang says.

"In the past most people thought it was difficult to develop CPU chips, but we made it by investing 10 million yuan (US$1,209,687), this has greatly encouraged our IT researchers."

(People’s Daily 10/16/2001)