SHANGHAI, Aug. 18 -- China will install Godson, its domestically developed central processing unit, into its next generation of super computer, Beijing-based Star Daily reported today.

"It will be adopted in our super computers in 2008," said Li Jun, the CEO of Dawning (Shuguang) Computers, a domestic computer server producer and China's major super computer supplier.

Godson series microchips were launched in 2002, which at the time equaled to the performance of an Intel 586 CPU. Though officially dubbed "Godson" in English, it is known in Chinese as "Longxing," literally "dragon's chip."

The country has several domestically branded super computers operating in computer centers in some of its larger cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. Unfortunately, most of them are based on foreign technologies, such as Intel CPUs and IBM servers. Some even use foreign designed software.

The information industry is becoming more important in the economy. Without its own chips, China would pay trillions of yuan for imported computer terminal units by 2020, said Li Guojie, dean of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

However, China has made great achievements in its Godson series, which now comes in several different varieties and can be used in personal computers and in super servers.

The Godson-2E CPU, a member of the Godson family, has reached a performance equivalent to the early series of Intel's Pentium 4 CPUs.

Some previous tests have shown that the 1-gigahertz Godson-2E CPU is capable of competing with a 2-gigahertz Pentium 4 CPU.