Chinese chipmaker set to enter CPU race against Intel, ARM and AMD with custom CPU

It's about time we got some competition out of China, where they're close to unveiling details on a new 8-core processor designed and developed entirely within the country of China. The new CPU is a custom design and ready to take on competitors Intel, AMD and ARM in the PC, server and supercomputer categories.

Development on the chip began over a decade ago in 2001, by Loongson Technology, a group that receives funding from the Chinese Academy of Science. The first processor they developed was the 32-bit Godson-1, which was followed by the 64-bit Godson a few years later and since then, the chips have been used in low-power notebooks since 2008. Late last year, the Shenwei supercomputer was turned on, and powered by the same design.

The latest chip out of the company is the Godson-3B1500, which sports a 1.35GHz clock speed, and is capable of performing 172.8 gigaflops of performance while chewing just 40W of power. The chip is manufactured under a 32nm process, sporting 1.14 billion transistors. Loongson CPUs aren't compatible with Microsoft's WIndows OS, which will hinder its adoption - big time. There are still plenty of places this chip is destined to reach - mobile devices being an absolutely huge market, for example.

We should see full details on the new processor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco early next year.