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by wk_end 62 days ago
ARM isn't US controlled, is it? British and also now Japanese since it's owned by SoftBank.

Meanwhile, wouldn't China be more heavily invested in Longsoon?

1 comments

ARM is British (America’s closest ally) and proprietary. If you’re swapping, just eliminate the risk and cost entirely.

LoongArch is 32-bit instructions only. This means no MCUs due to poor code density. That forces them into RISCV anyway at which point, you might as well pour all your money and dev time into one ISA instead of two. RISCV has way more worldwide investment meaning LoongArch looks like a losing horse in the long term when it comes to software.

Quite the contrary, the fragmented ecosystem is holding RISC-V back.

There are currently 3 variants of LoongArch ISA. The reduced 32-bit version targets MCUs. And LoongArch64 ATX/MATX motherboards with UEFI support is readily available. This makes it far more easier to develop with LoongArch.

What evidence do you have that RISC-V is being held back by fragmentation?

Every upcoming general purpose RISC-V core I'm aware of is targeting RVA23. That's even less fragmentation than x86 has.

Meanwhile, I don't know of ANY third-party chip designs using LoongArch, so asserting no fragmentation seems to be misrepresenting the situation a bit.

That's good news. Hopefully there will be more affordable replacements for x86 PCs.