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Loongson’s 3A5000: China’s Best Shot?

• ggm 4y ago
  Something to bear in mind is that fast cheap low power CPUs are almost invariably idle in small devices. We're already significantly ahead of CPU power needed to run most IoT devices, printers, commodity cameras, control logic in industry and so if you already target an arm core, these devices are analogous to RISC-V. Perfectly comulent for the task at hand. They might be several steps behind front edge VLSI, but IPR acceptable and capable of improvement. Within living memory devices were in 4004 and 8080 space at scale. I didn't personally expect MIPS instruction sets to wind up running cheap home routers and NAS, or SPARC either but both have been repurposed into those spaces These chips are capable of being deployed for good effect. They might never "catch up" and it might never matter. As long as llvm or gnu targets them, and there's an RTOS port, or some Unix like OS if realtime isn't needed, they'll be fine. Remember that rad-hardened machines are not running current CPU speeds, and we're doing fine in deep space. Most computers are mostly idle.