China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture

MrSeb writes "According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China's reliance on western intellectual property. There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS, Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU — but the Chinese leadership has also mooted the idea of defining an entirely new architecture. What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"

0x10c

[Megane]

I hear they're hiring Notch to develop the new CPU architecture.

Since China is a communist state ...

[Alain Williams]

Will all CPU instruction be given the same time allowance, or will it be a case of to each according to its need [wikipedia.org]?

Re:bad idea

[smitty97]

I thought we were an autonomous collective