Homespun Soaring Dragon server a decade behind the times

The Peoples Daily, that highly regarded font of technology news, announced last week that China has launched its first entirely home-grown server. While China already has plenty of home-made servers, this one will, for the first time, be powered by a Chinese chip.

Apparently a Beijing company named Shuguang Tianyan Information Technology will release the 'Soaring Dragon' server using what it calls 'the universally-applied CPU [central processing unit] Dragon Chip'. If any readers know of anybody who has even seen an installed Dragon chip, we would like to hear about it.

The Soaring Dragon will also run Shuguang's own distribution of the Linux operating system.

'The Dragon Chip is proved to be very sound in performance, steady and reliable in operation and utterly sufficient to meet the working requirement of the server and Web site,' the newspaper said.

In typically forceful China Daily style, the paper said the chip, formally known as Godson, has turned a new leaf in Chinese history and would strengthen national defence, security and other unnamed crucial sectors.

'Information security constitutes the first and foremost line in national defence. However, the line was built on foreign technology and completed with materials from a foreign country, so we cannot but be worried about it.'