1y ago

Loongson CPU makes its way to Chinese mini PCs

www.theregister.com

7 comments

The 3A6000's LoongArch architecture takes cues from RISC-V and MIPS, which Loongson used for its prior CPUs. However, LoongArch might be more heavily based on MIPS than Loongson lets on, as one developer calls the Linux kernel code for LoongArch CPUs "a blind copy of the MIPS code."
Why not go all in with RISC-V instead of creating their own "LoongArch" cpu architecture?
- Because they want to ~~add hardware surveillance devices to it~~ say that they made their own architecture? Yk how these communistic countries love to show off
  
  Ah yeah, the only ones that like to show off
  Ftfy
  Yk how these ~~communistic~~ countries love to show off
  Also you can do riscv and backdoors.
  
  Nothing about RISC-V disallows hardware-level surveillance. Most if not all surveillance hardware on our devices are really just super-low-power ARM CPUs. You can in theory just make a RISC-V chip capable of doing the same work.
  I do think you're probably right that it's more about having exclusive control over the intellectual property and the ISA specification. RISC-V does allow you to close-source your chip designs, but the foundation behind it was only moved to a relatively-neutral country (Switzerland) in 2019, which is some years after Loongson moved to proprietary CPU designs.
  They're the only ones going proprietary as far as i know, most are going for RISC-V
- Uh...profit? They only have one religion in China.
  
  But RISC-V is royalty-free and already supported by Linux and most compiler toolchains. Surely adopting it is more profitable because they don't need to maintain their own fork of Linux kernel and compiler toolchains to support their custom CPU architecture.

7 comments