China's Super Computer Uses 1Ghz Chips

China's Dawning 6000 super is nearing completion and when it is finished, sometime next year, it is likely to rank in the top 500 super in the world. Although it doesn't sound too impressive to be ranked in the top 500 (how many super can there be?) The Dawning will be doing so using China's own Loongson or "Godson" processors, a which last saw light of day in the 90's only to be pushed out of the computing game by Intel. Most current super use thousands of consumer level processors from either Intel or AMD. Each is clocked at around 2.5 Ghz or higher and once joined in tandem these little electronic brains can work on difficult computations in a matter of seconds. The Dawning's cluster of CPU's will only be clocked at 1Gh/z which is the same power as the chip in the iPad I'm typing on now! It's not about big numbers when making a fast though and engineers from China’s Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) and the Academy of Sciences believe that the Loongson with it's unique MIPS architecture will have more than enough grunt to take it to the big boys.