China's First Server 'Dragon Chip' Made its Debut

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, September 29, 2002

China's First Server 'Dragon Chip' Made its Debut

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The semi-conductor market in China's mainland will see an annual growth rate of 35 percent and a requirement of 17 billion chips before 2005. By the year of 2010, China is going to be the second large semi-conductor market of the world.

Sept. 26, Shuguang Tianyan Information Technology Ltd. announced that China's first Server "Soaring Dragon" of its own intellectual property rights came into the world. The Sever was brought out by using the universally-applied CPU "Dragon Chip" just developed and turned out by the Computer Institution of the Chinese Academy of Science.

Aside from that, used in the manufacture of the "Soaring Dragon" Sever is a kind of specific mainboard with the "Dragon Chip" CPU jointly developed by Shuguang Co. and the Computer Institution of the CAS and the Shuguang LINUX operational system developed by Shuguang Co. alone. According to the analysis of persons from the business circle, the debut of the "Soaring Dragon" Sever marks that China has set out on the marketization of its "Dragon Chip".

The "Dragon Chip", as a product of China's own intellectual property rights, has attracted the attention of the people in China ever since it came into the world. Undergoing many a strict examination and test by the Computer Institution of the CAS and other authoritative organizations in China, the Dragon Chip is proved to be very sound in performance, steady and reliable in operation and utterly sufficient to meet the working requirement of the server and website.

The Shuguang Co. says, the brought-out of the "Soaring Dragon" Sever has not only turned over a leaf in Chinese history that there was "no chip" in China's server trade but also strengthened greatly the national defence, national security and actual strength in many sectors of crucial importance. It has made China's computer industry to follow its own and independent track of development.

The person also made a further explanation, saying that China used the US chip in the past. Information security constitutes the first and foremost line in national defence. However, the line was built on the foreign technology and completed with materials from a foreign country, and so we cannot but be worried about it.

The birth of "Dragon Chip" is considered a landmark on the road for the development of national sci-tech industry. Nevertheless, people are worried about it, thinking that though the "Dragon Chip" is designed on our own it will fall into the trap of foreign intellectual property rights provided it is compatible with that of the others. Dr Sun of the VIA Tech., the only chip-maker in the world able to match with the Intel was ever worried, since the old-brand manufacturers of the Intel CPU entered early into the market, applied and acquired many patent rights it was very difficult for the newcomers to make a detour away from these patents. Moreover, the Intel's monopoly of the market has made it to turn out an actual standard-maker in the market.

But according to the analyses of the experts present at the meeting, the VIA is different from the "Dragon Chip" of China for the competition between the Intel and the VIA is mainly focused in the PC market while the "Dragon Chip" is basically used on severs in the service of businesses and trades, such as banking business and information industry. What's more important is that the CPU of the PC market is based on the Intel's framework of X86 and so it's quite easy to fall into the intellectual property right trap the Intel laid out, whereas the Shuguang "Soaring Dragon" Sever is based on the RISC structure, a totally another standard. Therefore, it will not fall into the intellectual property right trap.

According to the estimation of the Ministry of Information Industry the semi-conductor market in China's mainland will witness an annual growth rate of 35 percent before 2005 to reach a scale of 40 billion US dollars with the chips needed to amount to 17 billion pieces. By the year of 2010 China is going to turn out the second large semi-conductor market in the world.

In correspondence to this, 2001 saw the semi-conductor market in China's mainland reach 13 billion US dollars but that produced by it fell short of 10 percent. Experts come to conclusion that China has to develop chips of its own intellectual property rights so long as it wants to stand out a giant in the world of semi-conductor industry.

By People's Daily Online

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