As college admission letters go, few can beat the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS). The university put a locally made CPU along with the letter sent to each of the 400 or so students in its 2019 cohort.
Each student will receive the admission letter, a Longson 3A CPU, and a Chinese copy of Leften Stavros Stavrianos ‘A Global History: From Prehistory to the 21st Century,’ among other orientation materials, according to the university’s official WeChat account.
“Lately, the escalation of Sino-US trade friction has once again proved that key technologies must be firmly held in our hands and we must be self-reliant … are you ready?” the president of UCAS Li Shushen wrote in the admission letter to all new students.
Li said the Longson processors were a gift from the university to its students and called the Longson CPU a shining example of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ homegrown innovativeness.
Longson CPUs were first developed in 2001 by the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The homegrown processor is the pride of the country which has long depended on foreign chips and reflects the country’s tech ambitions.
However, Longson CPUs—formerly known as Godson CPUs—still lag far behind in performance from processors manufactured by industry leaders such as Intel and AMD.