Loongson releases next-generation CPU
1–10 of 61 posts
Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU
#2I remember the Loongson MIPS laptop made headlines many years ago. Richard Stallman even used one for a while.
It got a lot of attention among my hacker space fellows, but I don't remember why. Was it an open hw design or something?
Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU
#3I remember the Loongson MIPS laptop made headlines many years ago. Richard Stallman even used one for a while. It got a lot of attention among my hacker space fellows, but I don't remember why. Was it an open hw design or something?
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 :/
Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU
#4Any chance systems based on it will be sold outside China?
Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU
#5I remember the Loongson MIPS laptop made headlines many years ago. Richard Stallman even used one for a while. It got a lot of attention among my hacker space fellows, but I don't remember why. Was it an open hw design or something?
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.
Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU
#6Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU
#7I’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 as far as diversity with AMD64, MIPS, RISC-V, ARM, OpenPOWER, and then semi-custom variants of RISC-V and ARM. It’s fun.
Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU
#8Any chance systems based on it will be sold outside China?
You can buy systems based on earlier Loongson CPU's from Ali Express right now if you want to. I can find dev boards, some small raspberry pi-like devices they call Loongson Pi as well as the tower-pc-like LS3A5000-7A2000 system.
They seem pretty expensive for how weak they are, so probably not much point in buying them besides to play around with the architecture.
Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU
#9Any 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.
Re: Loongson releases next-generation CPU
#10I remember the Loongson MIPS laptop made headlines many years ago. Richard Stallman even used one for a while. It got a lot of attention among my hacker space fellows, but I don't remember why. Was it an open hw design or something?
Ten years ago it was kinda the only x86 alternative available in a laptop form factor, but was otherwise unremarkable except for being quite buggy.