[photopress:Loongson_CPU.jpg,full,alignright]STMicroelectronics has entered into a five-year agreement with the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) to sell China’s homegrown Loongson processor in markets around the world. Under the agreement, the first chip to be offered by STMicroelectronics will be ICT’s Loongson-2E, a 1GHz processor that is manufactured using a 90-nanometer process.
The Loongson processor family has been having difficulty finding its niche in the market, partly because the chips do not use the x86 instruction set used in chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Instead, the Loongson chips use an instruction set based on MIPS, which is not able to run the full version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Thus STMicroelectronics has signed a licensing agreement with MIPS Technologies for the MIPS64 architecture as part of plans to sell the Loongson chips around the world. But even then they will be marketed as offering the same performance as Pentium III and Pentium 4 processors and it is difficult to think of major market sales.
Source: Finance Asia
You must log in to post a comment.