Homemade CPUs on the way for local supercomputers

BEIJING - By the end of 2011 China-made supercomputers will bid farewell to foreign microchips and start using their own "Chinese core", according to one of the country's leading scientists, Hu Weiwu.

National People's Congress Deputy Hu Weiwu, who is the chief developer of the Loongson series of microchips at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), told reporters on Saturday that the "Dawning 6000" supercomputer, jointly developed by the Institute of Computing Technology of CAS and the Dawning Information Industry Company (DIIC), will adopt Loongson microchips for the first time as its core component. It will have a computing speed of more than 1,000 trillion operations a second.

"Our information industry was using foreign technology. However, just like a country's industry cannot always depend on foreign steel and oil, China's information industry needs its own CPU (central processing unit)," Hu said.