[tempeler]

it seems bad investment. firstly, it's an old architecure. secondly, How will they measure the efficiency of their investments?.Instead of investing in outdated architectures, they could fund universities, or support at least two or more companies in a competitive setup — that way, something much more efficient might emerge. But when a company is state-funded in a monopolistic way, it's quite hard for it to succeed. The U.S. had a reason for supporting AMD against Intel back then.

[ptx]

They are doing that as well. There's a lot of investment in RISC-V: https://asiatimes.com/2025/03/china-all-in-on-risc-v-open-so...

For x86, supporting multiple companies would be more difficult, as they would need a license for the ISA (which Zhaoxin inherits from Via).

[tempeler]

risc-v is much more reasonable for countries like china.What I want to emphasize is this: Instead of paying license fees for outdated x86 architectures, it would be much more beneficial to allocate those resources to universities. If you're paying for a license but can't generate a return on that investment quickly, then something is wrong.

[spookie]

You are completely misunderstanding China's goal. They want the expertise, being self-sufficient, while taking what they can so they don't start from 0.

Risc-V is arguably risky, so they have their hands on everything at the same time so they're sure they have a winner.

Markets don't matter. They want to develop the technology and have the talent to achieve it, fast.

[happycube]

As in the article, it doesn't have to be good. yet.