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I feel this is important, one of the things China has felt they have been held back on is chip production, especially something like the x86 and x64 chips. Now
by gscott 8y ago
I feel this is important, one of the things China has felt they have been held back on is chip production, especially something like the x86 and x64 chips. Now they are good to go on something that is a national priority. They can produce hundreds of thousands of cpu's as many as they want now with no limitations from the US Government since now they can do it locally.
- ksec 8y ago>one of the things China has felt they have been held back on is chip production Not sure what you mean by held back, As far as we cant tell, ignoring all the JV and shares, this is basically AMD making their EPYC chip in TSMC specially for Chinese Market.
- baybal2 8y ago>As far as we cant tell, ignoring all the JV and shares, this is basically AMD making their EPYC chip in TSMC specially for Chinese Market. Yes, basically Chinese paid near $300m just for the right to put own label on it, and distribution rights.
- Waterluvian 8y agoShame on me. I read the title and flat out assumed China was stealing the IP.
- acct1771 8y agoYeah, I don't think you can be blamed for that one at all...
- asaka 8y agoChina have Zhaoxin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin) which can produce X86 chips already.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoIn terms of performance, VIA Nano and EPYC are hardly comparable.
- gaius 8y agoone of the things China has felt they have been held back on is chip production Really? They have a decent MIPS story there, have had for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawning_Information_Industry#Dawning_6000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawning_Information_Industry#D... They could literally have ignored x86, but they are making the same strategic blunder the UK made in the 1980s
- userbinator 8y agoYes, MIPS is everywhere in all sorts of consumer devices like routers and cheap Android phones/tablets, but it lacks performance, and also compatibility with existing software.
- gaius 8y agoSee the second link - they are using MIPS for HPC so it’s performance must be adequate
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoMIPS had been used in HPC applications in the past. It’s just an ISA, like x86 or ARM, and (these days) has less to do with performance than the CPU architecture and process user to FAB it. Heck, they could even bring back 68k’s and make them work well enough.
- phire 8y agoYep, all you need to do is build a massive out-of-order superscalar pipeline with 8 to 10 execution ports and a very large reorder buffer (150 to 200 uops). And idealy toss in hypertreadding. Intel has done it with x86, IBM have done it with POWER, AMD have done it with x86 (more or less independently to Intel), Sun/Oracle have done it with SPARC, Apple have done it with ARM and most recently it looks like ARM's Cortex A76 is joining the league. All these designs look very similar, they are basically variatins on the same archtechure with different front ends.
- pabloski 8y agoYes it is important for competition. But this gives x86 another century of survival. Seriously, someone kill x86 please!
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoIf you use any complex tool enough you will rapidly come up against its limitations and bizarre design implementations. Is there any reason to believe any other architure that tries to be, approximately, everything for everyone would fair any better?
- krylon 8y agoNever underestimate the value of backward compatibility. Any architecture that wants to take a decent swing at replacing x86 will either have to be x86-compatible or do a good job at emulating it accurately and efficiently.
- lawnchair_larry 8y agoNo it won’t. ARM has already displaced it pretty heavily and will continue to do so.
- krylon 8y agoIs "displaced" the correct term, though? In mobile devices, ARM has an almost(?)-monopoly indeed, but x86 never was a serious contender in that space to begin with. The same goes for "IoT" devices. In new areas of computing, Intel is just one vendor among many (well, several), and the more the market tends to demand low-power chips, Intel's advantage melts away. In that sense, I agree with you. In HPC, I could see ARM become a serious alternative, because the trend seems to be to delegate the heavy lifting to GPUs, anyway, and the GPU does not care what kind of CPU feeds it, so to speak. But in the traditional desktop area, if you cannot run Windows and the huge number of third-party applications available there, you might as well give up. And to completely "replace" x86/x64, you have to compete in the desktop market as well.