6 ms·
My guess is that the people laughing about how hot and slow these chips are now won't be doing so in 5 to 10 years.
by tambourine_man 3y ago
My guess is that the people laughing about how hot and slow these chips are now won't be doing so in 5 to 10 years.
- cyanydeez 3y agobecause there'll be a more relevant processor to laugh at?
- olyjohn 3y agoThis is like the Hyundai (automobile) of CPUs. When Hyundai started competing in the US, it's cars were slow, cheap and kinda crappy. They got some foothold by being cheap above all... But now, their cars are formidable competition to some of the best out there, and are leading the way in a lot of areas. Intel better not get overconfident again, these guys could catch up before they know it.
- Strom 3y agoHyundai didn't have the problem of requiring people to build roads differently. Loongson however will have that problem, as software is either targeting x86 or ARM.
- blooalien 3y ago> "Loongson however will have that problem, as software is either targeting x86 or ARM." This is one (of many) advantages of open source software. If you have access to the source, you can build it on a ridiculously wide range of hardware. I've been downright shocked over the years at some of the strange things people have run actually useful (and entertaining) open source software on. Doom runs pretty much everywhere just for one example. ;)
- cyanydeez 3y agogreat for china & open source but it's still not the majority. also, the unix dependcy graph is formidable and needs to be supported to just bootstrap.
- pantalaimon 3y agoDebian is already fully bootstrapped on LoongArch
- to11mtm 3y agoEven as someone who hasn't compiled a kernel in a loooong time (10-12 years?) this is a weird position to me. AFAIK Loongson's ISA is some sort of superset of MIPS64. Not exactly ubiquitous but MIPS64 has been around for a while so I would expect bootstrapping to be fairly simple. Of course, bootstrapping is not the same as, say, using the parts of the superset that help with x86 emulation to speed things up, but even QEMU has supported LoongArch since 7.1 (over a year ago.)
- crest 3y agoThat's not an insurmountable problem with a billion people as captive audience. At first glance the ISA is nothing special and that's a good thing. It's a run of the mill 64 bit RISC ISA with little endian byte order and no unusual alignment or store order constraints to watch out for. If something compiles for x86-64, ARM64, RV64GC, etc. it should compile for that LoongArch if there is a compiler (backend) for it. If the MMU stayed as similar to MIPS64 as their earlier chips it shouldn't be too much work to write and maintain a Linux (or *BSD port to it). The custom ISA becomes a real problem if you need Windows and other closed source software on it, but China has declared it political goal to rid itself its dependency on Microsoft.
- xcv123 3y agoChina's goal with Loongson is to reduce reliance on foreign technology. Their government can easily build a "road" with a billion workers.
- olyjohn 3y agoI'm not sure I see what you mean. This is an x86 chip, is it not?
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y agoIt's not.
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y agoThat's why LoongArch contains: LoongBT, faster x86 and ARM binary translation, 213 instructions
- manuelabeledo 3y agoCars are hardly comparable to chips.
- cyanydeez 3y agoanother comment or points to this being closer to trains. they've built a comparable train but lack a standard set of tracks 0(software)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- baz00 3y agoWe'll have newer hot and slow chips by then like we always have.
- manuelabeledo 3y agoMaybe. Maybe not. I don't think anyone is suggesting that China isn't capable of building an efficient and powerful CPU or not, but will they, at any point, catch up to contemporary CPUs from Intel, AMD, Apple, etc.?
- baz00 3y agoI am suggesting that they can't. They have a serious innovation problem. A lot of their designs started out stolen or cloned from the West. They also don't have anything like ASML available to them. And to get this out SMIC ripped off TSMC intellectual property. I'm not saying they won't deliver useful silicon but they won't be delivering comparable silicon. And it'll be under trade embargo no doubt due to the IP issues so they will have a very limited market to scale into. This happened before (GDR) and the products were never competitive. I think the best thing they have done though is kick out compatible ATmega parts and the STM32 parts. They're really killing it there.
- meepmorp 3y ago> A lot of their designs started out stolen or cloned from the West IIRC, Loongson was a straight copy of MIPS with the names changed (in the first few iterations, at least).
- xcv123 3y ago> And it'll be under trade embargo no doubt due to the IP issues so they will have a very limited market to scale into. This was created for their own domestic market. China's goal is achieve independence of foreign technology. With 1.3 billion people they have a very large market.
- FooBarWidget 3y ago> A lot of their designs started out stolen or cloned from the West This is also called learning by doing. This is how skill and expertise is most efficiently developed in the very beginning. This trope of assuming that copying is inherently valueless or devoid of creativity or innovation is simply wrong, and comes from an implicit assumption of superiority of the self. They may not innovate as much as you expect now. But they are building a foundation for future innovation. Also: Huawei is still leader in 5G technology, with the best products. You should look at their patents, they own the majority of 5G patents.
- bsder 3y agoThey have been hot and slow for 10+ years and haven't gotten any closer to not being hto and slow. And now RISC-V is likely to pretty much wipe them out.
- creer 3y agoWon't RISC-V make it easier to copy and improve on designs?
- bsder 3y agoLoongson is MIPS not RISC-V. The issue is whether China will get behind the RISC-V stuff and contribute to a semi-unified ecosystem or whether the individual companies will fuck it up by balkanizing everything in an attempt to one-up their competitors. I'm not optimistic. The West mostly doesn't really care about RISC-V. ARM licensing costs don't seem to be completely out of line unless you are talking super-cheap devices--which mostly come from China. (A good counterexample is Nordic Semiconductor. They are having to compete against cheap Chinese BLE alternatives so they needed to start looking at RISC-V).
- suprjami 3y agoThis poster knows what's up. I'd put money on a future which looks exactly like this.
- creer 3y agoI was answering the parent remark which was about RISC-V. And my point is that if RISC-V achieves a significant amount of open designs and tooling then anyone who joins is roughly speaking guaranteed parity (in design - something like ISA and microarchitecture, not in foundry). Which is much better than the current situation.
- antisthenes 3y agoDon't worry, the software guys will take care of making everyone's chips hot and slow.
- pinewurst 3y agoYou mean in the same way we laugh about the Russian Elbrus CPUs?