China has been working on its own processor architecture for more than a decade and the result has been many different version of the Godson processor, also known as Longson. When we last heard of the development of the Chinese Godson processor, which was about six months ago, scientists were working on Godson 3, a quad-core MIPS processor, but there was mentions of an octo-core version. It has now been revealed that this octo-core Godson-3b processor will become the heard of a new supercomputer in development at government-funded Dawning.
Godson 3b will be used in blade servers that in turn will be used as the backbone of a Petaflop supercomputer to be completed next year. The blade servers will launch in September 2009, but the work with China’s first own supercomputer will take a bit longer.
Godson 3b houses eight physical processing cores and each core will operate at 1GHz. The 65nm processors will later on appear as 1.5GHz models, but exactly when is uncertain.
Dawning 5000A
Supercomputer builders Dawning’s latest project was an AMD-based system called Dawning 5000A and with a peak performance of 180 TFlops it broke into the top ten on the Top500 list. So far there are only two supercomputers that has broken 1 Petaflop with IBM Roadrunner in the lead but Dawning will give them a serious run if its latest Godson project fans out.
