Godson CPU to compete with Sun's UltraSPARC T2

The Chinese are not sitting idle. They are planning a 16-core MIPS64 CPU. If it works, it should be a good web server processor. As Sun's open source T2 processor shows, it's a good idea to have simple (less die area) but many cores in server environment.

AMD and Intel's x86 baggage may cause a problem for them. I heard that a lot of wattage is consumed on decoding x86 instructions into RISC like code. And Intel's x86 graphics card idea is a tough sell for programmers.

The problem with Sun is its management. It won $1b from Microsoft, and it went on a spending spree: $4b on StorageTek and then the rest of its cash on MySQL. Much like a teenage kid who got his first pay check, but end up in 4x debt. StorageTek and MySQL buy was like shooting itself in the stomach two times. Now, its market cap is falling below that of Nvidia. With another downturn in the global environment, Sun will not have the cash to feed its people to keep doing their open source projects: Solaris, Java, MySQL and UltraSparc T2.

By the way, I never quite understand the point of open sourcing T2. Those who can't make their CPU won't be interested in the code, those who can will have their own design, and design may be too complicated for students... Maybe Sun just wanted to show its engineers were really smart...