(
Linkleri Üyelerimiz Görebilir. UslanmaM Üyeliği İçin Tıklayın) - STMicroelectronics has signed 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

the company said Wednesday.
The first chip to be offered by STMicroelectronics under the agreement will be ICT's Longsoon-2E

a 1GHz processor that is manufactured using a 90-nanometer process. In a statement

STMicroelectronics said the Loongson chips

also called Godson

offer "impressive performance and low power" that are suitable to a range of electronics applications.
The company did not provide details of those applications.
ICT previously relied on a spin-off company

BLX IC Design Co.

to market the Loongson chips to customers

but its efforts have yet to yield much in the way of contracts. ICT did not immediately respond to e-mail questions concerning the agreement with STMicroelectronics and its effect on the relationship with BLX.
However

the agreement is likely to put some muscle behind ongoing efforts to promote Loongson as a viable processor option

thanks to STMicroelectronics' larger size -- the company is one of the:-)10 largest chip makers in the world -- and established relationships with device makers around the world.
Billed as offering the same performance as Pentium III and Pentium 4 processors

the Loongson processor family has:-)
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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 aaaa version of Microsoft's Windows operating system and other software commonly used on PCs.
Even so

the Loongson processor has been pitched for computers running the Linux operating system. But these systems have not made significant inroads into China's fast-growing PC market.
The Loongson's instruction set has been the source of :-):-):-):-):-):-):-)ion between ICT and MIPS Technologies

which licenses out patented instructions contained in the MIPS instruction set. In an effort to diffuse this tension

ICT agreed in 2005 to stop referring to the Loongson chips as MIPS-compatible processors

but talks between the two paries failed to yield a licensing agreement despite years of discussions.
Despite this impasse

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.
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