Intel’s take on Godson-2 is accurate, BLX chief says

The chief executive officer of BLX IC Design said Thursday that recent comments by an Intel executive regarding BLX’s Godson-2 processor are a fair assessment of the chip.

“The comments were factual and I think they were pretty accurate,” said Eddie Zeng, the CEO of the Beijing microprocessor vendor.

Earlier this week, Shekhar Borkar, director of Intel’s microprocessor technology lab, praised the Godson-2 chip, saying it represented a significant advance in the capabilities of the chip’s design team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Computing Technology (ICT).

While Zeng said Intel’s assessment of the chip was basically fair, some in China felt slighted by the remarks, according to a local Chinese press report.

Online reaction to the report in Chinese Internet forums generally expressed support for China’s homegrown microprocessor, but some users said, “Although Intel recognizes that China has made great strides in CPU design, the company still looks down on us,” according to the Beijing Business Today newspaper.

Borkar said the Godson-2 doesn’t compete with Intel’s own offerings and the company views the development of the chip positively, as a sign that China is embracing advanced technology.

The Godson-2 chip is based on what its designers formerly called a “MIPS-like” architecture and now refer to as the Godson architecture. The Godson architecture shares many similarities with the MIPS instruction set but includes several unique instructions to replace those that have been patented by MIPS Technologies.

With a clock speed of up to 500MHz, the Godson-2 is designed to be used in embedded applications, such as set-top boxes, rather than in PCs, where Intel’s chips dominate.