[tylerritchie]

TIL: LoongArch is a new MIPS CPU made by the Chinese company Loongson [1]. It looks like early benchmarks are middling. That said I don't see any indication of power consumption.

>Loongson has been very busy this year bringing up LoongArch, their new downstream of the MIPS CPU architecture. They have been working on porting the Linux kernel to LoongArch as well as the open-source code compilers and related components for what they aim to be a Chinese domestic high performance CPU.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LoongArc...

[Spivak]

I mean if I made a new middling CPU by 2022 standards I would be popping the champagne.

[tylerritchie]

Yup, that's what I was trying to get at. Middling benchmarks for a new chip seems pretty great.

[throwaway81523]

Why is anyone doing a new mips cpu, given the similarities between mips and risc-v? Why not do risc-v like everyone else? (Cynically: Oh....).

[chenzhekl]

Their chips "Loongson" appeared long before RISC-V is a thing in 2002, when MIPS is still widely used in the embeddeed world. I guess they just do not want to drop the experience accumulated in developing their previous chips.

[rurban]

and avoid the US backdoors into their military computers of course.

[avianes]

RISC-V is an open and royalty free ISA, it can't really be backdoored. And several Chinese companies are working on RISC-V implementation

[woadwarrior01]

From the wikipedia page for it[1]:

The Register reported in November 2021 the suspicion that LoongArch combines the best parts of MIPS and RISC-V, along with custom instructions.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#LoongArch

[anotherhue]

'silicon security' is probably as important as energy security.