China Switching To Home-Grown Chips For Supercomputers 198
rubycodez writes "The Tianhe-1A system will be the last Chinese supercomputer to use imported Intel and AMD processors. By years end, China's own 64 bit MIPS-compatible 65nm 8-core 1GHz version of the Godsen (Longsoon family) processors will be used, including 10,000 of them for the 'Dawning 6000' supercomputer. Yes, the chips can and usually do run GNU/Linux, but also can run FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD."
Silly. (Score:2)
That's silly. They're trying to build a supercomputer out of MIPS chips. That'll never work...
Speaking of which, it does make me wonder about all this fuss over 64 bit ARM chips for datacentres. There are already high performance, low power 64 bit MIPS chips and have been for years. They're well proven, have good compiler support, cheaply licensable, low power (perhaps not quite as los as ARM?), have standard 64 bit modes and so on.
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Where would I buy some of those?
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Where would I buy some of those?
You can license the core.
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That's silly. They're trying to build a supercomputer out of MIPS chips. That'll never work...
Silly? Perhaps, for a given value of "silly". But "never work"? Of course it can work - it isn't even going to be hard, all the technology and code already exists.
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Of course it can work
duh.
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In addition, most of the Computer Organization and Design books I've seen use the MIPS instruction set to teach assembly and machine code and diagram the processor fairly well, so the architecture should be understood by a good number of computer scientists and therefore coders. You would think that would give MIPS an advantage, although the general attitude around them seems to be that MIPS died with Irix. I don't recall ever seeing a non-SGI MIPS computer on the market, but I haven't really been looking
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I don't recall ever seeing a non-SGI MIPS computer on the market, but I haven't really been looking too hard, honestly.
You don't recall seeing WRT54G?
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PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, many consumer network devices (including, but not limited to, many Linksys and Buffalo routers), networked video players and Blu-ray players (using Sigma chipsets)...
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DEC had a number of MIPS based computers that ran Ultrix.
DECstation 3100, 5100 workstations.
The 5900 (and 5800?) mini computer.
Ultrix ran on Vaxen and MIPS systems.
The Alpha chip and OSF/Digital Unix/Tru64 replaced MIPS and were much faster.
I think SGI had Indy and Indigo2 systems at the time of the DECstations. They may have preceeded the purchase of MIPS by SGI
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Re:Silly. (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking of which, it does make me wonder about all this fuss over 64 bit ARM chips for datacentres. There are already high performance, low power 64 bit MIPS chips and have been for years
Not really. Low power MIPS64 chips use 10-20W. Low power ARM chips use under 1W. They're both low power within their various domains, but the ARM chips get a lot more performance per Watt. Most of the time, the MIPS chips are more interesting for supercomputing, because they have better floating point, better interconnect (there's a lot of experience floating around building large MIPS systems, a lot from ex-SGI people), better toolchains (MIPS has been in HPC so long that it's a standard target for compiler in that market), and better overall performance.
The ARM chips are interesting because a lot of server tasks are not CPU-bound. You can stick 64 ARM SoCs, each with enough flash and RAM to run a small business server, in a 1U case and not worry about heat. You can connect it to a big SAN for storage of data (just put the OS and apps on the flash). Idle power usage can be a few mW per server, power usage under load is basically the power usage of the SAN - the rest of the hardware is adding 1W or so.
It's a mistake to confuse the server and HPC markets. They have very different requirements.
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Note that something to add is that until very recently ARM were 32bit only, which is not very good for datacenters.
They added a kludge on the ARM ISA (not as eleguant as the MIPS64 ISA) so now it isn't an issue anymore..
power consumption (Score:2)
"low power" quad-core 65nm 1ghz MIPS64 chips use 10 watts; 90nm, 20 watts. if you go to 28nm and stay at 1ghz, you divide by four - so that's 10/4 = 2.5 watts.
also, there are two different configurations for 65nm done by TSMC: one is high-performance (lower cost, 20 masks) and the other is lower-power (slightly higher cost, 32 masks). the lower-power CMOS one was only invented recently, so this is why you often see e.g. Broadcom Network / Server MIPS64 Quad-Core 1ghz 65nm CPUs consuming 10-20 watts. with
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Building an ARM-based supercomputer is more or less what nVidia is planning, although they're taking a leaf out of IBM's book. Most of IBM's supercomputers are advertised as using PowerPC chips running Linux, but that's only part of the story. The Linux instances and the PowerPC chips (typically low-power ones, like the 4xx series) are really just there to handle I/O. The real work is done on a separate CPU that has no OS and can devote 100% of its time to the running computation. nVidia wants to do the
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If you were as heavily involved in attacking the computer systems of other countries as China is, you would want to make sure that you control as much of your own systems as possible.
Wrong. Dead Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
you are completely wrong. this processor has over 200 x86 emulation instructions, allowing it to run x86 code with only a 30% performance penalty, under qemu. it also has two 256-bit vector pipelines that provide SIMD floating-point operations so powerful that a single 1ghz core can do 1080p at over 100 frames a second. to claim that "it will never work" in the face of evidence that you simply haven't looked at is ridiculous. look up the specifications on the GS464V, please. also, you are not aware that the Chinese Government has purchased 25% of MIPS, and is working with the MIPS teams in the U.S. to create this processor. this processor *IS* MIPS's high-performance, low-power 64-bit MIPS chip.
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it also has two 256-bit vector pipelines that provide SIMD floating-point operations so powerful that a single 1ghz core can do 1080p at over 100 frames a second.
In these modern times, if you are going to be doing lots of SIMD on your HPC, you will replace the 10,000 CPU's with 500 GPU's + 500 CPU's to drive them.
Its cheaper to buy, and cheaper to operate.
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Its cheaper to buy, and cheaper to operate.
And performance dies screaming at the first branch instruction. Yes, GPUs have great throughput, but they suck for large categories of algorithm. If they didn't, then CPUs would have the same performance. They generally lack any branch prediction, so a branch can stall the pipeline completely - if you've got more than one branch every hundred instructions, running it on the GPU won't give you anything like the theoretical maximum throughput. If your threads aren't exactly in lockstep (i.e. if two threa
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And performance dies screaming at the first branch instruction.
You cant do separate branching *at all* between the multiple scalers within a SIMD vector. All the scalers have the same operations performed on them.
You seem to be confused about why the negative performance of branching matters on GPU's... its not because it impacts their SIMD capabilities.. because it doesnt.. its because it impacts their CPU-like "GPGPU" capabilities... which means... what I said is 100% correct:
If you are doing heavy SIMD work, get a pile of GPU's.
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You cant do separate branching *at all* between the multiple scalers within a SIMD vector. All the scalers have the same operations performed on them.
No, but you can do branching between each set of operations. If you're doing a matrix operation, then you can do a couple of SIMD operation on a row, then a branch based on the result. This is pretty fast on most CPUs, it's painfully slow on a GPU.
You seem to be confused about why the negative performance of branching matters on GPU's.
No, I'm not. One of the things I work on is a GPGPU compiler for HPC, so I'm intimately familiar with their strengths and weaknesses and when it makes sense to offload work to them from the CPU.
its not because it impacts their SIMD capabilities.. because it doesnt.. its because it impacts their CPU-like "GPGPU" capabilities... which means... what I said is 100% correct
I never said it did. I said that it affects their ability to hand
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No, but you can do branching between each set of operations. If you're doing a matrix operation, then you can do a couple of SIMD operation on a row, then a branch based on the result. This is pretty fast on most CPUs, it's painfully slow on a GPU.
You are doing it wrong. The branching is only one of your issues. You are preventing coalesced reads, as well as causing bank conflicts in shared memory.
What you are describing is effectively "gimped" from the start. You have a single matrix but want to leverage instructions which operate on multiple data. Sure, the matrix is made up of multiple data.. but what you should be doing is operating on many matrices (hundreds.. thousands even) at the same time... Certainly you know the difference between AoS (
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Wow, you really have no clue. If your problems are that loosely coupled, then you don't need to do SIMD at all, just solve each matrix in a separate process on separate CPU. For typical applications where supercomputers are used the problem is to solve a single, huge problem, not a gazillion small ones. That is when parallelism becomes hard, otherwise you don't need a supercomputer at all.
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Why not? SGI were building supercomputers from MIPS chips 10 years ago...
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Was that supposed to be sarcasm? Before SGI was destroyed by Rick Belluzzo, it made plenty of high-performance clustered computers. Considering that nost non-x86 CPU architectures development was cancelled as a result of "business" decisions, there is no reason to expect that MIPS-based computer will be somehow worse than other architectures, as long as development continues.
After all x86, taken on its own, is a terrible architecture. However continuous development allowed Intel and AMD to implement it effi
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it is Loongson family (Score:5, Informative)
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There'll be a Beowulf Cluster of these along soon!
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The processor family is called Loongson [wikipedia.org] and not "LongSoon" as summary says. But the typo is funny in its own way.
Yeah, your new CPU is just a spider bite away...
I made TWO bad typos (Score:2)
Run IRIX on it (Score:3)
I wonder how well these chips compare to the R16000's?
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Not the only ones (Score:2)
The Japanese 10 petaflops-scale K computer in Kobe uses Sparc-compatible cpus from Fujitsu. Sounds like a good idea if you want to build know-how, not just a machine.
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Although with Oracle deprecating Sun with all their might, it's hard to say what kind of future SPARC has. Clearly China has seen the same wall I have.
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Why would Oracle's acquisition of Sun have anything to do with Fujitsu's SPARC development? Quite a few systems from Sun over the last few years have contained rebadged Fujitsu SPARC64 chips, but Sun is certainly not Fujitsu's only (or even largest) SPARC customer.
If Slowlaris is deprecated then the demand for SPARC drops sharply. Linux runs on cheaper chips and there's no magical SMP glue in SPARC architecture processors that hasn't been done elsewhere.
28nm 16 cores is next (Score:4, Informative)
the article has missed out some important information, which is that they are planning two versions of the CPU. the first is a Quad-Core 65nm, and the second is a 16-core 28nm, which will use the same amount of power (about 12-15 watts). hopefully they will also do a Single-Core 28nm which would be under 1 watt, because at 1ghz the SIMD units are so powerful they can do 1080p at 100 frames per second. really, this CPU design is a game-changer. i've been advocating their use for some time - http://lkcl.net/laptop.html [lkcl.net]
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Two reasons - they haven't been built yet, and maybe the Chinese have a different set of benchmarks that they use.
Where to buy? (Score:2)
I would like to buy a small (perhaps 1U) server based on these chips if such a thing exists...
so what? (Score:2)
I'm sure these are very nice chips, but anyone can do similar, given funding. there are a number of cores available for licensing (like they did with MIPS), and adding vector units is the obvious way to boost your peak flops without blowing your power budget. I guess I don't really see why this merits all the coverage - for instance, what fraction of peak performance can it get on real code (say, a weather or MD simulation, not HPL)?
the quoted peak gflops/watt for this project are decent, but not much bet
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Re:Domination (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking a snapshot of where the Longsoon is now and comparing against where AMD and Intel are now is flawed. The processor business chases moving targets, rather than comparing single samples you need to look at a longer history to try to estimate the rate of change.
Intel started 30 years ago. The Longsoon project started 9 years ago. In that time they have closed the gap on Intel to about 3 years. This 65nm design is comparable with something from about 2007 (the clock speed is lower but having 8 cores helps a lot). The real question is where they will go next.
If they meet their stated plan they are going to skip the 45nm node and make the Longsoon 3B on a 28nm process. They are aiming at a higher clockspeed, more cores and a large integrated vector co-processor that would rival Fusion or Larabee. If they can do what they claim then they are in the process of overtaking Intel and AMD now and we will see the effects on the world processor market over the next five years.
Whether or not they can do this is a big question, and according to the stories in the press it caused quite a debate at HotChips when they announced these plans. It's not clear who will be licensing them a 28nm fab, or quite how they've packed that much into a design. It's not clear how AMD and Intel will respond to a new competitor with state backed funding and a huge protected market.
The next five years will be interesting times...
Re:Domination (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but it's ridiculous to think that because Longsoon starts today at 1GHz, that they will be able to accelerate faster than Intel and eventually overtake them. The rate of change has got nothing to do with the starting point. A 1GHz MIPS core is easy to make by today's standards, so it just doesn't mean anything.
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Intel and AMD are hampered by having to provide legacy compatibility, MIPS is a much newer designed architecture that should impose less bottlenecks on processor advancement.
Re:Domination (Score:5, Insightful)
Your reasoning is impeccable, but I can't begin to count the number of times market forces, amortizing massive investments over huge economies of scale, have trumped common sense.
What's interesting here is how differently China plays this game. They're focused on long-term national prestige and influence, so they can tolerate being a few years behind by specifying the use of domestic products. That ensures the cash flow their enterprises need to catch up. That would. be unthinkable in the US, with the. exception of a few companies like Boeing, and. even then it's ideologically incorrect to be up front. about helping the chosen enterprise. The standard position is that the competitor kettle is blackened by government favoritism.
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Shatner?
No, but close: posting from a mobile phone.
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I can't begin to count the number of times market forces, amortizing massive investments over huge economies of scale, have trumped common sense.
In a command sector of a mixed economy, such as this sector is, the government can absorb the massive investment costs and can effectively ignore "market forces" that you mention. Once the companies designing and fabbing the chips are strong/advanced enough, they can be unleashed upon the world as a very strong competitor. This is one of the advantages of having
Could have said same thing for PowerPC (Score:2)
Intel and AMD are hampered by having to provide legacy compatibility, MIPS is a much newer designed architecture that should impose less bottlenecks on processor advancement.
Motorola and IBM said the same thing about PowerPC when they started. Over the following years the PowerPC got about 20-40% better performance at the same clock rate as the contemporary Pentium, SMP also had a similar performance advantage. However Intel was able to win with actual performance by achieving higher clock rates.
Also recent Intel x86 architectures have a modern RISC design. The x86 instruction set is merely a facade. The x86 instructions are translated to "micro-ops" that run natively on the
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Why hasn't Intel or AMD exposed a RISC interface? It would allow developers to target either the legacy one or the newer one.
It seems like this would be a great avenue for weaning people off x86 without incurring huge performance losses while at the same time keeping legacy support.
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For one thing, if they don't expose it they can change it anytime they want. Translating to micro-ops isn't a huge performance hit, so being able to improve the underlying architecture without worrying about compatibility is something of an advantage.
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Because if they do that, developers and users will EXPECT future intel processors to now support THAT instruction set. Which just make's Intel's problems worse if they change how the RISC instructions work internally.
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Motorola and IBM said the same thing about PowerPC when they started. Over the following years the PowerPC got about 20-40% better performance at the same clock rate as the contemporary Pentium, SMP also had a similar performance advantage. However Intel was able to win with actual performance by achieving higher clock rates.
In the end, Intel won because of typical underhanded marketing strategies (which all businesses seem to do, naturally ) and its tie-in to the hardware of the Windows market. They simpl
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A 1990s Toyota is "easy" to make today, but if China starts making them in bulk then Toyota wouldn't be happy.
In a world where slightly outdated chips are "good enough", and the marginal cost of making them is probably a few bucks, I'd be very worried if a really big competitor was breathing down my neck.
It would be commercially suicidal to try and undercut AMD, because a price war would leave no profits for either competitor. So even if it's "easy" to start a price war, nobody wants one. Unless, of course,
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"one of those problems that doesn't *really* need solving"
I would argue that it desperately needs solving. Current computer chips are power hungry monsters that have so many legacy systems that not old eat up die real-estate which adds cost but also eat up power.
Data centers are becoming hot spots for resource usage, sucking in amazing amounts of electricity. One day, data centers will rival high rise office buildings and industrial plants in how much polution they are responsible, and that day is coming qu
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A 1990s Toyota is "easy" to make today, but if China starts making them in bulk then Toyota wouldn't be happy.
In a world where slightly outdated chips are "good enough", and the marginal cost of making them is probably a few bucks, I'd be very worried if a really big competitor was breathing down my neck.
...
Bingo! The U.S. lost its consumer electronics industry to Japan in the 1970s because U.S. manufacturers were not concerned with low cost competition on the low end of the market. The low end is always pretty big and massive sales makes massive revenues and massive production; massive production and revenue perfect the industrial processes and leads to superior design and production technology; superior technology extinguishes competition who focuses only on the "high end". The low end will move up and canni
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You make a good point. One of the tragedies of the US is our frontier and pioneering spirit. (Not that other people and countries don't have the exact same thing. But the US just happens to be the biggest right now.) We do the hard work of inventing a lot of things, the hard work of refining the processes. And then other countries and peoples learn from our mistakes and do "better" than we did at it.
Of course, it would probably have been a lot harder for the Chinese if some Intel or AMD partner hadn't s
Re:Domination (Score:4, Insightful)
We do the hard work of inventing a lot of things, the hard work of refining the processes. And then other countries and peoples learn from our mistakes and do "better" than we did at it.
And all of mankind benefits. Too bad so many people are stuck in the "us and them" mindset.
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Yes, it's amazing how fast the chinese can reverse engineer old technology! Good thing there are strong copy-protection laws in force to prevent this sort of thing.
All snark aside, this does point out something very important; The Chinese can never surpass the performance of the people they're copying. On the other hand, they can price them right out of the market. The down side (for the entrenched powers) with the world going multicore is that you can solve problems by just throwing more cores at them. Granted, there are plenty of problems which can't be solved in this way, but even a really crappy CPU core of today is shockingly impressive by Ye Olde Tyme standards.
Re:Domination (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because the chinese are stupid and they don't have any engineers.
What the hell are you people on? Can't you see the clear patterns? China began exactly like every other nation: first they copy, then the invent, then they lead. Compare with Japan. In the 60ies, you spoke of "cheap japanese copies". Then they took over, now you have Toyota and Sony.
Do you really really believe that a 5000 year old civilization with nearly 1.5 billion people, the highest average IQ in the world and lead by engineers, won't figure out how to design a CPU? What will it take for you to wake up?
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Whoa there, watch the straw men.
You said it yourself; the Chinese have been doing this processor business for about 9 years, while Intel has been doing it for about 30. What on earth makes you think that the people with 3x the experience are stupider? If a veteran company such as Intel can make terrible mistakes like FDIV or the more recent Sandy Bridge recall, what makes you think some relative noobs won't make such mistakes?
At least in the US, when Intel gets nailed, we hear about it in the press. Do y
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Which part sounded like a propagation of the Mhz myth? Was it the bit where I said that a lower clock-speed was offset by a larger number of cores.... oh wait a minute, that would be the exact opposite...
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The part where you go off about the speed of the parts and the die size, without considering such things as the experience of the designers in avoiding inevitable bugs.
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That really sounds like the Mhz myth to you? Do you even know what the Mhz myth is?
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It's one thing to copy someone else's successful designs, and a whole different thing to make your own.
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Probably correct. The 19th century belonged to Europe, 20th to North America, and 21st to Asia. History keep changing, but considering that the population of Asia is so large and that China does not really rely on superstitions a Chinese hegemony may last longer than any based on European/Middle East traditions.
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China does not really rely on superstitions
Have you seen Chinese medicine?
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Those who have been treated by real Chinese medicine, as opposed to the snake oil imitations, would beg to differ. Sure, it's not more advanced than modern western medicine, but it's not based on superstition at all.
Western "medicine" was no better until a few decades ago. And even today many health problems are still treated along the lines of "we don't know how to treat this, so take this pill as it seems to work on 20% of the patients, um.... unless it's placebo".
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Chinese vs Western is irrelevant.
There is scientific/evidence-based medicine, and then there is everything else.
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Agreed. My claim is that people do practice Chinese medicine in a scientific/evidence-based way, although admittedly fraudsters selling snake-oil are easier to find.
For example, as far as I understand it, there is active scientific research on extracting the active ingredients of many herbs used in Chinese medicine. (traditionally they are simmered in pots until the resulting liquid becomes concentrated, which becomes the medicine to be drinked)
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Yes, superstition is an innate part of human nature.
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Superstition is not part of human nature; curiosity is.
Superstition is the vacuum left over when you give up, or lack the means to continue the pursuit of knowledge.
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Superstition is not part of human nature; curiosity is. Superstition is the vacuum left over when you give up, or lack the means to continue the pursuit of knowledge.
I think you just argued yourself into agreeing with the parent: giving up is part of human nature, as is having goals that exceed our resources.
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Compare Chinese medicin with "speaking in tongues"
And what? That whole Western world is somehow more superstitious than the Chinese one, because a few people "speak in tongues"? By those remarkably pathetic standards, whatever country you're part of is bag-of-doorknobs stupid simply because you're part of it and made the above argument.
Re:Domination (Score:4, Informative)
The Japanese elite *may* have outlived the European/American elite but I'm gonna [citation needed] you on that one... The Japanese common man, however, certainly did NOT live longer or better than his Western counterpart.
I refer you to "Standard of Living in Japan Before Industrialization: From what Level did Japan Begin? A Comment" by Yasukichi Yasuba in The Journal of Economic History Vol. 46, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 217-224.
Yasuba takes to task the notion that life for the commoner in Japan was better than that in the West. While economic development HAD been ongoing throughout the Tokugawa shogunate, and circumstances had improved for the Japanese laborer, the reality of the situation is that farmers here and farmers there both were treated very poorly. He also points out, specifically, the flaw in Hanley's research (which estimated life expectancy to be around 40 years in Japan) specifically used a source which excluded year 0 deaths, and then substituted Western infant mortality rates in its place. At the time, Japan would be much closer to India than the West. By using data which matches temple records more closely, Yasuba suggests that the actual life expectancy of the time was around 35, which (again) puts it below the West.
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I don't think there will be a Chinese hegemony in the way there's been an American hegemony where the average Chinese will be much richer than the average American. The labor market has become far more fluent, once you hit some minimum standard of education, technology and political stability the jobs flow, both the "IP economy" jobs and manufacturing jobs because shipping is a relatively small part of the cost.
While there's a different stretch between the workers and the capitalists, I think the difference
Re:Domination (Score:4, Interesting)
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Maybe so but I'd love to see the planning meeting.
Engineer 1: Lets build a 64 bit 1Ghz CPU.
Engineer 2: Then lets build a supercomputer out of 10,000 of them.
Marketing: 10,000 CPUs.. hmm.. Lets call it the Darwin 6,000!.
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HAL 9000 (Score:2)
They are obviously refering to the age of the earth.
Nope, they are expecting to achieve 2/3rds of the performance of a HAL 9000.
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China doesn't have *CTA-like proposals because they're not the current forerunners, they have no ip innovations to protect and actually much to gain from violating ip laws. If ever China becomes the pioneering nation in a tech field, rest assured they will press their own ip protection proposals on the rest of the world.
Re:Domination (Score:4, Interesting)
As a Chinese American, I'm glad to see China using their own technology, but it's hardly any sign of world domination, especially when the Chinese chips aren't anywhere close to Nehalem, Fusion, or Sandy Bridge. China has already forced Microsoft to hand over the source code to Windows previously, and being aware of exactly what you're getting from a foreign company or agency is a wise move for any developing nation. Remember the big debate over the NSA_KEY variable a while back?
Besides, when it comes to spying, I would take Mossad over Intel or AMD anyday.
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China has basically killed the rest of the world's economies with the poorly designed and cheaply manufactured products...
Or you could place the blame where it lies: With retailers who will lie to you with marketing about the quality of a shit product, and with consumers who lap up the shit gladly instead of doing some research to find a quality product. China would sell us quality goods if we refused to purchase their crap.
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and with consumers who lap up the shit gladly instead of doing some research to find a quality product.
Honestly, isn't quality just as negotiable as price? Let's say I can buy a "quality" lawn mower that is serviceable and with good parts availability for $300, and there is a piece of garbage Chinese lawnmower that is not serviceable for $100. I have to decide whether or not that good lawnmower is going to last 3x longer than the Chinese lawnmower, and whether the cost of labor/parts when it does break is going to approach the cost of a brand-new Chinese lawnmower.
Extend this argument to 99 cent strings of C
Re:Chinese People's Daily (Score:4, Insightful)
and anyone want to fill me in why 10,000 8-core MIPS chips at 1ghz can be expected to outperform 12,000 12-core x86 chips at 2.1ghz?
I missed that claim in TFA. There are very good reasons for wanting to use their own chips though. They have a lower power envelope (around 20W for the quad-core version), but more importantly they are helping to ramp up the economies of scale for the production. 10,000 is about the smallest run you can do for a CPU and it be cost effective. A single order of that size makes the per-unit cost low enough that it becomes attractive for other companies (or projects within China), which helps fund future development, rather than sending the R&D money overseas to the USA / Israel.
It's worth noting that these chips are now produced with all of the relevant patents licensed from MIPS Technologies, so they can legally be sold in the USA.
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I think it's simple economics rather than some devious strategy. Their standard of living is much lower, so their cost of production is much lower, so most of the trade goes one way.
It's like globalization has opened a partition between two halves of a swimming pool filled to different heights, so it's equalizing. You can't expect water to go uphill.
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The Chinese are no different from any other people.
The idea that we are all the same is as ridiculous as the idea that we are all different; that is, we are all similar, but we are all different.
As long as there is oil to power the ships across the Pacific, they will be fine. Oh, wait.
China has a shitload of land and can do whatever it wants because the people are different and will knuckle under to anything. Witness their damn dam, one of the worst manmade environmental debacles of history. How many people did that displace? China could go into biofuel-from-algae and probably will if big oil loses much power. (Collectively, Big Oil is more power
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we are all different.
I'm not.
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China could go into biofuel-from-algae and probably will if big oil loses much power.
They could likely go Soylent Oil, if they gave up the one-child-per-family law. (I am being modest.)
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They could likely go Soylent Oil, if they gave up the one-child-per-family law. (I am being modest.)
I see what you Proposed there.
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the Alpha cpu would be a better architecture to base a system around
[citation needed]. My understanding of the reason for the demise of the AXP is that it didn't scale, although it did teach us a lot of important lessons we needed to learn to make processors that could be faster. We ended up with processors from AMD that use its bus and execute an instruction set someone cares about.
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Additionally, it just wasn't that fast. A 750MHz PA-RISC generally outperformed a 1GHz Alpha at everything except float-heavy code with very few branches.