China has been increasingly active on the technological front, being the home ground for a number of leading tech giants. A number of sources now seem to be implying that the country has plans of approving and implementing a single computer architecture nationally.
Enjoying a rather powerful position in the tech world, China has often chosen to devise its own standards for a number of technologies. For instance, the same technology that is being called 4G LTE elsewhere is rather titled TD-LTE which comes with some differences.
Now, it seems that the Chinese government is trying to devise an instruction set architecture (ISA) standard, one which could be applied uniformly across the country. This is being done so as to rely less on foreign intellectual property, or so is being said. ISA essentially defines how the hardware of a machine will tackle programming and other types of inputs and outputs.
According to a personnel of MIPS Technologies, ‘They want a common software ecosystem and the only way to get that is with a common ISA.’ However, whether or not building an ecosystem around a self-devised standard can be possible, is considered questionable by many. For instance, the president of ARM considers it a very difficult task and doesn’t seem much bothered by the aforementioned reports when he says, ‘We are of course aware of this initiative. It is not new, and has been in discussion for many, many months.’
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