BEIJING - By the end of 2011 China-made supercomputers will say goodbye to foreign microchips  and start using their own "Chinese core ", according to one of the country's leading scientists, Hu Weiwu. Hu told reporters on Saturday that the "Dawning 6000" supercomputer, 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 parts. It will have a computing speed of more than 1,000 trillion operations a second. Making supercomputers with Chinese microchips is one of the nation's major science and technology projects. Three organizations - the Institute of Computing Technology of CAS, Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology and the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) - have their own supercomputer projects. According to their schedules, all three institutions will need to meet the target of using domestically  developed microchips by the end of this year. Hu said the new supercomputer will use fewer than 10,000 Loongson microchips, and will also be more energy-efficient. Tianhe-1A, developed by NUDT in Hunan's provincial capital Changsha, is the fastest supercomputer in the world. However, Tianhe-1A largely runs on 14,336 CPUs made by Intel, and 7,186 GPUs (processing units) from Nvidia, two US chip-makers. Hu said there will be difficulties ahead as there is little _ equipment specially developed for these supercomputers. "We have enough supercomputers in China but still can't make full use of them," He said. Hu added that although the China-made CPUs have improved since they were first produced in 2002, they have a long way to go to compete with US chip-makers such as Intel. What will raise the speed to more than 1,000 trillion operations a second.?
Dawning 6000 Loongson microchips DIIC Tianhe-1A