Chinese invest $5bn to build Intel x86 clone (Godson)

"Wouldn't it be funny if Silicon Graphics started building systems with these Godson-3 chips? They could dust off Irix and take it out for a spin on some new iron and allow it to run x64-based Linux applications in emulation mode"

Love the idea, specially they build some nice desktop systems. But IRIX would need some serious work in order to be competitive again. Linux on MIPS would be a much more practical choice.

Maybe it's time for the State Department to revisit technology export restrictions to China?

Calling this a clone is a understatement to say the least. At 16-core, 2 GHz, and 512 gigaflops these are some pretty serious numbers. China is getting scary.

Calling this an x86 chip is misleading:

"...the Godson-3 chips have instructions added to help the QEMU hypervisor (the one that's at the heart of Red Hat's KVM hypervisor) to translate instructions from x86 to MIPS format. According to early benchmarks, the emulation penalty is about 30 per cent."

I recall reading an article saying that the latest intel chips had 4-5 billion transistors, this article doesn`t have any transistor counts higher than 600 million.

Something must be missing.