China's godson gamble

The Dawning 6000 supercomputer, which Chinese researchers expect to unveil in the third quarter of 2011, will have something quite different under its hood. Unlike its forerunners, which employed American-born chips, this machine will harness the country's homegrown high-end processor, the Godson-3B. With a peak frequency of 1.05 gigahertz, the Godson is slower than its competitors' wares, at least one of which operates at more than 5 GHz, but the chip still turns heads with its record-breaking energy efficiency. It can execute 128 billion floatingpoint operations per second using just 40 watts-double or more the performance per watt of competitors.