Loongson releases next-generation CPU

[BirAdam]

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 as far as diversity with AMD64, MIPS, RISC-V, ARM, OpenPOWER, and then semi-custom variants of RISC-V and ARM. It’s fun.

[throwaway4good]

It is the golden age if you are a Chinese chip designer or operating systems engineer; getting to reinvent/rebuild the whole computing stack.

[RobotToaster]

The performance they quote also seems to be in x86 compatibility mode, I wonder if you can bypass that and compile for the native architecture.

[cyp0633]

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

[monocasa]

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

[mrweasel]

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.

[erremerre]

I use a core i7-920 from first generation that I recently changed with a Xeon compatible socket and another i7-3770 from third generation as daily drivers. And I do some gaming with non-intensive games. The computer works perfectly with no major drawbacks.

The third generation is noisy because it is in a small format case and with very deficient ventilation that I can't solve.

[The_Colonel]

> 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 ...

[INTPenis]

I 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?

[saagarjha]

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 :/

[rixed]

I used to have one as my only laptop for years and I miss it dearly. Built quality was above average, keyboard was great, mate screen (not as rare back then though), easy to open, lack of hardware shenanigans and usable/open source BIOS, no proprietary drivers required, came with Linux preinstalled. Reasonably fast.

It was a MIPS little endian, which is also very good. I can't remember if it was fanless or not.

[tedunangst]

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.

[sillywalk]

I don't know if this is statement accurate, but from the (archived) manufacturer's website:

"The world's first fully free software. All system source files(BIOS, kernel, drivers etc.) are free software, no close firmware needed." [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160703160118/http://zkml.lemot...

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38461939

[Qem]

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

[poizan42]

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.

[BirAdam]

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

[DeathArrow]

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

[drtgh]

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...

[dragonelite]

Huawei probably has first dibs on capacity given their contribution to SMIC 7~5nm process.

[Signor65]

As far as I know, it's because China does not have access to the latest fab equipment from ASML and have to use an older technology to manufacture their chips.

[bilekas]

I think it's down to the technological challenges that involves and they are just not there yet.

[manuelabeledo]

SMIC 7nm doesn’t scale just yet.