https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/05/china_schools_riscv_pc/
Today's lesson covers the potential for Loongson's made-in-China architecture to hurt Microsoft and Intel
Performing sufficiently for cheap production cost, they'd be a low RISC high reward investment.
No gonna lie, this is really cool. While the efficiency isn't great, for a first attempt these are surprisingly decent specs for what is effectively a mobile cpu. Their server level ones also are pretty decent, and while they aren't really a match for the newest zen architecture, they are also a first attempt on an architecture that isn't x86 or arm (some mix of risc v and mips).
There's this back story about the "LoongArch instruction system, a RISC ISA that blends ideas from MIPS and RISC-V". The article says it is MIPS-compatible and even runs the same Linux code [Loongson's] old MIPS-based CPUs did. Why not just use RISC-V? MIPS is licensed from the USA. I guess they have a lot of legacy people at Loongson.
Why Occident doesn't do the same ?? RISC-V is a libre hardware movement created and moved by many Occident Universities and yet we have few RISC-V in the market.
Are we too much stagnated with corporation products or what?
There is often a very limited market for underperforming hardware, which is how RISC-V chips will be starting out. There is a large amount of accumulated knowledge about, and workflow to accommodate, already established ISAs.
Due to most companies being publicly traded, taking risks is much less common, since a drop in profits could see a massive portion of the company's funds get pulled, or more likely the CEO being yanked by the board. So they play it safe and choose already established architectures.
Because as a business, it doesn't make sense in occident. They will be much worse in price to performance, and probably forget to run windows or other software.
From a business sense, it mostly makes sense of you think being dependent on "traditional" is a risk in a way or another.
I seriously hope China makes RISK-V a viable option . I'm fed up with slow adoption of arm by so many vendors . ARM Linux laptops are going to be great, but no ones making them . atleast if RISKV becomes a thing , we can move away from x86 , maybe innovation and healthy competition can return to Intel AMD duopoly