Chinese scientists announced October 13 that they have succeeded in developing  the first China-make, all-purpose, high-performance  central processing unit （CPU） Godson chip, and planned to produce "Pentium II" chip equivalent in  a year's time in filling in the country's blank to  that end.

    Jiang Mianheng, vice-president of the Chinese  Academy of Sciences, hailed the technological breakthrough  as a great achievement, according to today's People's  Daily.

    The technical know-how, which is of intellectual  property of our own, will accelerate the development  of China's IT industry and helps to ensure safety  of state network information system.

    China still depends so far on foreign manufactures  for some key components such as CPU and operation  system. Although the Chinese Academy of Sciences （CAS ） developed Red Flag Linux operation system  not long ago, it needs years to apply it widely on  the market and gradually replace Microsoft's Windows  system.

    At the beginning of this year, CAS worked out  China's most powerful server, Dawning 3000, which  has a peak floating speed of 403.2 billion times per  second but it contains IBM CPU chips.

    The Godson chip can still be improved in performance  and it is similar to the chip used in personal computer  486, says the 35-year-old professor Tang Zhimin, who  led a group of experts to develop the Godson chip.

    They plan to use Godson to make high-performance  servers to be used on computer networks in two or  three years, and five years later it would appear  on desktop PCs that use home-made CPU chips and operation  system, Tang says.

    "In the past most people thought it was difficult  to develop CPU chips, but we made it by investing  100bn yuan, this has greatly encouraged our IT researchers."