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Comment by cyanydeez | Hacker News Reader

because there'll be a more relevant processor to laugh at?

This is like the Hyundai (automobile) of CPUs. When Hyundai started competing in the US, it's cars were slow, cheap and kinda crappy. They got some foothold by being cheap above all... But now, their cars are formidable competition to some of the best out there, and are leading the way in a lot of areas. Intel better not get overconfident again, these guys could catch up before they know it.

Cars are hardly comparable to chips.

another comment or points to this being closer to trains. they've built a comparable train but lack a standard set of tracks 0(software)

Hyundai didn't have the problem of requiring people to build roads differently. Loongson however will have that problem, as software is either targeting x86 or ARM.

> "Loongson however will have that problem, as software is either targeting x86 or ARM."

This is one (of many) advantages of open source software. If you have access to the source, you can build it on a ridiculously wide range of hardware. I've been downright shocked over the years at some of the strange things people have run actually useful (and entertaining) open source software on. Doom runs pretty much everywhere just for one example. ;)

great for china & open source but it's still not the majority.

also, the unix dependcy graph is formidable and needs to be supported to just bootstrap.

Debian is already fully bootstrapped on LoongArch

Even as someone who hasn't compiled a kernel in a loooong time (10-12 years?) this is a weird position to me.

AFAIK Loongson's ISA is some sort of superset of MIPS64. Not exactly ubiquitous but MIPS64 has been around for a while so I would expect bootstrapping to be fairly simple.

Of course, bootstrapping is not the same as, say, using the parts of the superset that help with x86 emulation to speed things up, but even QEMU has supported LoongArch since 7.1 (over a year ago.)

That's not an insurmountable problem with a billion people as captive audience. At first glance the ISA is nothing special and that's a good thing. It's a run of the mill 64 bit RISC ISA with little endian byte order and no unusual alignment or store order constraints to watch out for. If something compiles for x86-64, ARM64, RV64GC, etc. it should compile for that LoongArch if there is a compiler (backend) for it. If the MMU stayed as similar to MIPS64 as their earlier chips it shouldn't be too much work to write and maintain a Linux (or *BSD port to it).

The custom ISA becomes a real problem if you need Windows and other closed source software on it, but China has declared it political goal to rid itself its dependency on Microsoft.

China's goal with Loongson is to reduce reliance on foreign technology. Their government can easily build a "road" with a billion workers.

I'm not sure I see what you mean. This is an x86 chip, is it not?

It's not.

That's why LoongArch contains:

LoongBT, faster x86 and ARM binary translation, 213 instructions

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