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Loongson releases next-generation CPU

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Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU

#31

Post by RobotToaster »

cingraa wrote: post #21
BirAdam wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA’s recent sanctions against the PRC has made Loongson forbidden if I remember correctly. Hopefully, this will change.

The sanctions are here to stay. The USA wants to make China capitulate. There is an economic war against China. When you cannot win by merit, you invent excuses to slap sanctions.

The sanctions also seem to have done a great job accelerating Chinese mainland semiconductor technology. Before the sanctions most mainland companies were happy having their chips fabbed by TSMC

Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU

#32

Post by throwaway4good »

dragonelite wrote: post #29
throwaway4good wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this is simply because until the latest sanctions, other Chinese chip designers could fab at TSMC at 7nm. Also Huawei has a quite capable AI offerings: https://e.huawei.com/en/products/computing/ascend

But are you really willing to risk it all go into a TSMC based work flow just to end up on the US bad guys list.

I think even Chinese companies believed that Huawei was banned and sanctioned because they did something wrong and not just because they were Chinese and really good at what they do.

Now of course they are all sanctioned and Huawei is sitting pretty with years invested in a sanctions proofed supply line.

Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU

#33

Post by RobotToaster »

BirAdam wrote: post #9
Qem wrote: post #4

Any chance systems based on it will be sold outside China?

The USA’s recent sanctions against the PRC has made Loongson forbidden if I remember correctly. Hopefully, this will change.

Other way around, until last month China officially banned most of the loongson chips from being exported. The ban was reportedly lifted due to interest from Russian companies in using the chips. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/loongon-cpus-bound-for-rus...

Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU

#35

Post by gbin »

The_Colonel wrote: post #26
mrweasel wrote: post #23

If they can keep up with the AMD and Intel CPUs they list, then that's actually pretty impressive and actually useful. There is a lot of people still daily driving 5 - 10 old processors just fine, it's absolutely plenty for a office desktop or even light development work. I would like to see actual benchmarks though.

> actually useful Except it's a custom ISA (fork of MIPS). It could be fine for Chromebook-like use cases (basically web browser machine), but not really for anything more serious ...

I guess you mean on the desktop? If this thing runs linux, it is as serious as everything that can run Linux.

Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU

#36

Post by drtgh »

DeathArrow wrote: post #16

Why do they use 12nm process node as opposed to SMIC 5nm or 7nm? Too expensive?

Does someone know what reference size to take for those SMC nanometers?

It may sound irrational to ask this kind of question, but marketing killed the meaning of "nm" a long time ago. As reference, through electron microscope the sizes of Intel 14nm seems equivalent to AMD.TSMC 7nm [1]

[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/272489/intel-14-nm-node-compared...

Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU

#37

Post by saagarjha »

jlokier wrote: post #5
saagarjha wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the BIOS was open or something like that. In general, though, it is hard to have a meaningful consistent position here because you can have most of the software be open and some random peripheral with closed firmware can DMA all over everything it wants :/

That issue can be dealt with using an IOMMU under host control. Those limit where the peripheral can DMA regardless of its firmware.

Just an example, DARTs and IOMMUs help close down that line of attack but there are still many proprietary and inscrutable blobs/peripherals/monitors that alter the behavior of modern computers which are almost impossible to avoid in general.

Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU

#38

Post by andsoitis »

cingraa wrote: post #21
BirAdam wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA’s recent sanctions against the PRC has made Loongson forbidden if I remember correctly. Hopefully, this will change.

The sanctions are here to stay. The USA wants to make China capitulate. There is an economic war against China. When you cannot win by merit, you invent excuses to slap sanctions.

> The sanctions are here to stay. The USA wants to make China capitulate. There is an economic war against China. When you cannot win by merit, you invent excuses to slap sanctions.

There are two types of games: finite games and infinite games.

Finite games have fixed rules, a winner and loser, etc.

Infinite games don't have fixed rules, conventions are just conventions to be tested/broken, and the goal is not to win but to stay in the game for as long as possible.

Most games in the real world are infinite games. "Winning by merit" is a finite game not an infinite one.

Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU

#39

Post by Jeff_Brown »

unwind wrote: post #15
cyp0633 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Loongarch, some sort of MIPS + RISC-V.

Wikipedia [1] has some more details, but not too many on the main page itself. Also from the top of that page I learned that "Loongson" means "Dragon Core" which to me as a westerner makes it sound very clearly Chinese (because dragons) but also a lot cooler (because ... dragons!). Nice. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#LoongArch

Associating China with dragons seems like such a lucky PR win to me. How many countries are, outside of that country, associated with any mascot at all, let alone such a badass one?

Also it seems appropriate that the Western concept of a dragon is much less friendly than the Chinese one -- at least, judging from the dances.

Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU

#40

Post by monocasa »

BirAdam wrote: post #7

I’d love to get my hands on one of these. They’re MIPS machines that are on-par with the Intel core i3 14100. Loongson is also involved with Deepin Linux, so they’re attempting to build out a Chinese-native technology stack. While I generally don’t care for things under control of the CCP due to surveillance concerns, I do love competition for bringing about new tech innovation. We’re now getting back to the 80s/90s…

MIPS asm, but not MIPS machine code. Different bit encoding.
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