Loongson 3A5000 Benchmarks For These New Chinese CPUs Built On The LoongArch ISA

[brucehoult]

I'll believe it when I see it.

Right now, China's Alibaba is the only company I know that has put RISC-V into production, and only as a basic no-frills server CPU. Tencent, ZTE and Huawei have not even got production silicon out, and the various universities in China with access to engineering samples are still in the "it boots Linux but that's it" phase.

And what?

No one claims RISC-V is widely deployed and competitive *today*. Are you so completely incapable of projecting the current position and the velocity into a future position?

I'm reminded of Steve Jobs quoting Wayne Gretzky.

[brucehoult]

If the board of directors were to decide to change the licensing model for future designs then it would put all investments and developments at risk. Such changes can always happen and have happened before. To think RISC-V had a major advantage, because it is currently free of charge is not as big as you may think. That it is currently free of charge may only be to get companies invested in RISC-V and once it takes off is it likely that some form of tribute needs to be made to keep it all running.

Most unlikely, as the directors come from different organisations.

In the very very unlikely event something like that happened, it would just result in a fork from the last free version, a new organisation to manage it, and maybe a change of name if necessary.

Once this year's crop of ISA extensions -- 1.0 versions of vector, bitmanip, cache management, packed SIMD, scalar crypto instructions -- are in to the RVA22 and RVM22 profiles there is already pretty much everything any other major ISA has. What is some future rogue board of directors even going to put into a non-free official spec to make it so much more compelling that people go along with them? Or Intel for that matter, as custom extensions.

[wangling]

Historically Tibet is under military control of China only after 1720. After Qing Empire collapsed, Tibet declared independence and got annexed again by People's Republic of China in 1951.

The model of democracy, the United States, will not be established until 56 years later. But now, under the rule of the “evil” CCP, Tibet is still Tibetan; In democracy and freedom, there are no Indians in America.

As a colored person, I really can't understand the benefits of democracy and freedom you said.

[Sonadow]

There's nothing to prove.

Technically RISC-V is a very conventional RISC, similar to MIPS and Arm64. Put the money in and it can do anything they can -- including M1-level and higher.

Non-technical, RISC-V has the business model, the buzz, the momentum, and investment is coming.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Right now, China's Alibaba is the only company I know that has put RISC-V into production, and only as a basic no-frills server CPU. Tencent, ZTE and Huawei have not even got production silicon out, and the various universities in China with access to engineering samples are still in the "it boots Linux but that's it" phase.

[brucehoult]

Now Si-Five might have their Unleashed board, which is pretty impressive and cool thing they have accomplished, but it cannot compete. The thing is expensive, and weak in performance. It is a desktop board that has the performance of a several year old ARM SoC for phones.
Against a x86 desktop board it is expensive and low performance.
Against a ARM mobile SoC it is expensive, low performance and lacks GPU, audio, 5G, DSP, ISP, AI, eMMC, UFS.

Perhaps you mean the Unmatched. The Unleashed is 3.5 years old.

No one thinks the Unmatched competes, least of all SiFive. It doesn't exist to compete. It exists to enable the software ecosystem to develop, in preparation for the chips and boards coming next year and the year after and the year after that which *do* compete. But not if they don't have software.

The Unmatched has a CPU that is comparable to an Atom, or something between a late Pentium III or PowerPC G4 and an early Core2. BUT it has much better I/O than any of those, with the modern GPU card of your choice, the latest NVMe SSD, 16 GB of DDR4 etc. And it has four cores, not one or two like all those.

It doesn't compete with the latest *Lake or Zen, of course, but I've spent more than half of my life using machines a lot less powerful and pleasant than the Unmatched.

[solidous]

While this is certainly true is the problem not in what China does, but in people who look to China for answers. In Europe has the UK broken away, because we want our control back and not be controlled by the European technocracy, and in the US are people voting for rulers who undermine their democracy. We need to work on our democracies. If we keep looking towards China and then see how they for example build top-ranking super computers from our old designs or who just put a rover on Mars like this was easy, then it triggers in people a desire to become like China, or that it was ok to boldly neglect the human rights of entire cultures on the idea that we would drop bombs on them sooner or later anyway, which is really just a dangerous mindset.

Your democracies, we both know that is A joke.

[brucehoult]

Nobody is going to use RISC-V as the CPU in a desktop, laptop, tablet or phone. Nobody is going to make a RISC-V based SoC on 5 nm with Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, Gigabit Ethernet, NFC, USB 3.2 and 5G modem and AI accelerator.

Nobody? That's a mighty big claim. How is it you know the business plans of every RISC-V International member?

[brucehoult]

RISC-V then still needs to prove itself and there is not much RISC-V on the mass market yet

There's nothing to prove.

Technically RISC-V is a very conventional RISC, similar to MIPS and Arm64. Put the money in and it can do anything they can -- including M1-level and higher.

Non-technical, RISC-V has the business model, the buzz, the momentum, and investment is coming.

[Brane215]

Having their own developments is a big advantage for countries, even if it is just for pride. If this means for China that it keeps their people's desire for democracy in check then it will have a significant value to the CCP.

1. It's not about pride but independence.

2. What exactly you define as "a democracy" ? Some mythical, Atlantis-style system ?
Can you point me to ONE good, real life example of western "democracy" ?

Take USA, for example. Can you point me to one significant example of its 300M+ citizens EVER "democratising" some of their problems away ?
When has an average American EVER really get to decide about anything ?
Whever anyone appeared with true change in mind, s/he was sidelined or killed.

[Sonadow]

If this means for China that it keeps their people's desire for democracy in check then it will have a significant value to the CCP.

You clearly don't know the Chinese.

They do not want American and Western democrazy. Only the Americans and Westerners interpret 'democracy' as voting.

In China, there is no voting yet the CPC cadres are beholden to the people they are sworn to serve.

When China prepares its Five Year plans, there is a very lengthy feedback period open to all citizens, who are strongly encouraged to share their views and opinions on how the country should move forward. This collection of public opinion has an influence on the CPC's decision making on the country's direction. This is why there is usually very broad support support by the masses for most policies implemented by the CPC.

When the Chinese protest, the authorities are obligated to quickly respond and address the source of their grievances, otherwise they are very likely to be dismissed from office. What the Western fake news machine never reports is that there are many small scale protests going on in China frequently but they are quickly resolved by having a representative from the protesters meet directly with the chain of authority to work out a compromise. What do you think was the trigger for the recent crackdown on Big Tech and monopolies in China?

Even without voting, China is a heck lot more democratic than most so-called liberal democracies.