The glorious People's Republic of China has been showing off its latest range of chips which it hopes will give the imperialist capitalist pigdogs in the decadent West a run for their money.

Weiwu Hu, the lead architect of the "national processor" of China, revealed three new chip designs at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The Loongson processor family (known in China by the name Godson), is now in its sixth generation. The latest designs include a one-gigahertz, eight-core Godson 3B, the more powerful 16-core, Godson 3C, and the smaller, lower-power, one-gigahertz Godson 2H, intended for netbooks and other mobile devices.

According to MIT Review the Godson 3B will be commercially available in 2011, as will the Godson 2H, but the Godson 3C won't debut until 2012. The eight-core Godson 3B is significantly less powerful than Intel best chip, the six-core Xeon processor and when Intel's forthcoming Sandy Bridge processor and AMD's Bulldozer processor come out the Godson 3B will be looking very out of date.

But the chips shown off indicate that China's chip-making capabilities are improving quickly. Intel is currently on a 32-nanometer process, while the Godson 3B uses 65 nanometers,which means that it is a lot slower. But the Godson 3C processor will use a 28-nanometer process and will be four times as fast as the Godson 3B.

IThe Loongson processor is based on the MIPS instruction set, the basic commands that a microprocessor understands. In contrast, Intel and AMD processors are based on the x86 instruction set. Boffins at China's Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) have added more than 300 instructions to the MIPS instruction set.