Chinese V-Dragon chip now on sale

Chinese firm, Culturecom Holdings Ltd says it has begun selling its V-Dragon chip, claiming 100,000 orders thus far. The chip is designed to run a local implemetation of Linux - known as Midori - and goes large on Chinese language support according to the company website. The company also says it had help from IBM in building its chip and is now teaming up with Transmeta to develop the Midori Linux.

The Chinese are keen to develop their own chip and operating systems to avoid reliance on US technology, which could have security implications for the People's Republic. Intel will feel the squeeze from the force of the Chinese push to develop its own chips and, since a copy of Windows XP would take the average paddy field worker six months to earn,* Microsoft will have an uphill struggle in the territory too, we feel.

The V-Dragon has a 32-bit RISC core and claims 64-bit read and write data buses for Processor Local Bus (PLB). The Memory Management Unit runs 16KB instruction and 16KB data caches, while the chip's High Speed Memory Controller is capable of supporting up to 4 SDRAM banks and a maximum total of 1GB SDRAM, the company says.

View: Culturecom Holdings Webpage