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Not everyone agrees that it's a wise decision due to the popularity of RISC-V in China. I guess looongarch is just something like a variant/extension of MIPS. I

by limoce 5y ago

Not everyone agrees that it's a wise decision due to the popularity of RISC-V in China. I guess looongarch is just something like a variant/extension of MIPS. It's not easy to move from one microarchitecture to another. MIPS is dead, and Loongson was not commercially successful in the past ten years. But I do admire their work on developing CPUs with good performance independently. It seems to be necessary for China, especially after US sanctions. Hope they'll finally get on the right way.

naisshooz 5y ago
>Hope they'll finally get on the right way. Yes, it'll take a lot of compute power to train all the various Uighur-tracking models. The thought of supporting a regime that commits genocide, systematic rape and hosts concentration camps that houses several millions of people, just so that I can maybe buy a CPU that's cheaper than Intel/AMD is absolutely repulsive to me. No! China (the CCP and it's supporters) can go F*ck itself, and I pray to God that any material "progress" that they've accumulated by exploiting the poor and vulnerable gets reversed. I know this will get down-voted, because I know you CCP-bots out there hate when people point out how disgustingly evil you are. Technology has no place in that hands of people without any ethics!
arthur2e5 5y ago
Loongson will probably stay fed with their military contracts. But just don't expect anything good to come out of the commercial front: they are known to never provide any useful documentation, with the Chinese Loongson user/hobbyist community itself relying on leaks. With inexistent documentation comes an awful open-source toolchain. Their official community "Loongnix" cgit is a collection of extremely outdated, long-winded forks of gcc and the kernel. They do provide patches to GCC and Binutils, but only barely enough for the errata (and the old MMX copycat). LLVM is overlooked here, so good luck with that ll/sc lockup when you try Rust. [The "grassroots" @loongson-community on GitHub does try to figure out some more instructions.] And that brings me to the topic of their fancy ISA extensions. Accelerated X86/ARM emulation, 256-bit SIMD (with a mnemonic of "VBCMULADDPD"), everything! But to hobbists who bought their commercial samples, all that silicon area is just expensive padding with no way to use them. If you can tolerate Google Translate, I recommend reading https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoongISA https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoongISA and some of the refs. Especially the comment article by "windows1089" on Zhihu.

by limoce 5y ago

naisshooz 5y ago

>Hope they'll finally get on the right way. Yes, it'll take a lot of compute power to train all the various Uighur-tracking models. The thought of supporting a regime that commits genocide, systematic rape and hosts concentration camps that houses several millions of people, just so that I can maybe buy a CPU that's cheaper than Intel/AMD is absolutely repulsive to me. No! China (the CCP and it's supporters) can go F*ck itself, and I pray to God that any material "progress" that they've accumulated by exploiting the poor and vulnerable gets reversed. I know this will get down-voted, because I know you CCP-bots out there hate when people point out how disgustingly evil you are. Technology has no place in that hands of people without any ethics!

arthur2e5 5y ago

Loongson will probably stay fed with their military contracts. But just don't expect anything good to come out of the commercial front: they are known to never provide any useful documentation, with the Chinese Loongson user/hobbyist community itself relying on leaks. With inexistent documentation comes an awful open-source toolchain. Their official community "Loongnix" cgit is a collection of extremely outdated, long-winded forks of gcc and the kernel. They do provide patches to GCC and Binutils, but only barely enough for the errata (and the old MMX copycat). LLVM is overlooked here, so good luck with that ll/sc lockup when you try Rust. [The "grassroots" @loongson-community on GitHub does try to figure out some more instructions.] And that brings me to the topic of their fancy ISA extensions. Accelerated X86/ARM emulation, 256-bit SIMD (with a mnemonic of "VBCMULADDPD"), everything! But to hobbists who bought their commercial samples, all that silicon area is just expensive padding with no way to use them. If you can tolerate Google Translate, I recommend reading https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoongISA https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoongISA and some of the refs. Especially the comment article by "windows1089" on Zhihu.