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Hasturtium posted:It looks like a number of motherboards with Loongson CPUs are appearing on AliExpress and the like at sub-$400 price points. With the knowledge that the CPU is not performance-competitive with x86 and subject to various limitations and frustrations endemic to being outside of more widespread ISAs, what are these things supposed to be like? Isn't Loongarch just MIPS with the serial numbers filed off? MIPS has been around for ages and there's no reason that it couldn't be used in a high performance design but it hasn't anytime recently. I don't know why you'd want to play with a Loongarch CPU when there's so many other exciting things going on.
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Oct 18, 2023 03:03
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Hadlock posted:From Wikipedia I've seen their PRs across plenty of human genetics research tools. Someone is paying for broad scale porting efforts to get all sorts of general purpose computing working well on Loongson Loongarch. It has had pretty good GCC support for a while and looks like they're trying to get Clang/LLCM support too: https://www.phoronix.com/news/LoongArch-Clang-Linux-Builds
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Oct 27, 2023 15:03
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I'm going to speculate some more about Loongson because I think that there's a lot of interesting forces in motion here. Loongarch looks like an emergency backup plan if China loses access to Intel, AMD, and big ARM processors. That might sound unlikely, but the US federal government has been updating the export rules of what is allowed to be exported to China recently, and they've changed the rules to specifically limit computing power. This was a surprise to Nvidia and AMD, who had specifically designed China-market products that were limited to meet the letter of the previous rules, which now leaves them with a bunch of parts designed for the China market that are now illegal to sell to China: https://www.techspot.com/news/100534-nvidia-stock-falls-after-us-government-restricts-export.html. It's not just GPUs. ARM has said that the new Neoverse V cores are too high performance to be legally exported to China: https://www.reuters.com/technology/export-controls-hit-chinas-access-arms-chip-designs-ft-2022-12-14/. Federal lawmakers are now singlehandedly choosing what CPUs and GPUs China is allowed to use, and I think they're expected to basically freeze the performance limit right now, so as Intel / AMD / ARM processors keep getting faster over the next few years, China just plain won't be allowed to purchase those. Nvidia apparently feels pretty burned by the rule change, which may make them less likely to try and offer a China-specific model that conforms to the new rules, just because they might get the rug yanked out from under them again. The current loophole is that "gaming products" are specifically exempt from these requirements even if they exceed the maximum performance limit: https://www.techspot.com/news/100611-nvidia-rtx-4090-looks-have-escaped-china-ban.html. This is breaking news this week, under the text of the rules it looked like the RTX 4090 would be banned in China but at the 11th hour it has been permitted. If the gaming exemption sticks around, we're going to see a hell of a lot of 4090s in China getting put into datacenters, and there would be a market for Nvidia to do a $10,000 "RTX 5090" that is a gaming product in name only. Chips and Cheese have been covering Loongarch, both older and newer products: https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/04/09/loongsons-3a5000-chinas-best-shot/. It looks like current Loongarch cutting edge is somewhere around Nehalem, but at lower clock rates. That's enough computing power to be useful still, and if you can't buy Intel, AMD, or modern ARM they need an option to keep the country running.
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Oct 27, 2023 18:19
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Well, I hope y'all are ready to destroy your RISC-V boards because they're going to be illegal pretty soon:quote:Some lawmakers - including two Republican House of Representatives committee chairmen, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner - are urging Biden's administration to take action regarding RISC-V, citing national security grounds. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-china-tech-war-risc-v-chip-technology-emerges-new-battleground-2023-10-06/ The cleanest way to make sure that the US doesn't help make RISC-V better for China to use is just to prohibit Americans from working on RISC-V. After all, we've got ARM, which is fully under the thumb of the US government and ready to restrict Chinese access.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:34
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in a well actually posted:https://www.hpcwire.com/2023/11/08/china-deploys-massive-risc-v-server-in-commercial-cloud/ 48 nodes, that's more than 1 rack full of 1U nodes! Imagine if someday the Chinese were able to afford a dozen racks full of computers.
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Nov 8, 2023 20:54
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Did HP ever release ARM blades (ok, cartridges) for Moonshot? I remember that they were pitching heterogenous compute architectures in it way back when. I guess this is around when AMD tried to make ARM chips too!
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Dec 15, 2023 18:20
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I never heard about or encountered moonshot as anything other than the butt of a joke, did anyone actually buy them?
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Dec 15, 2023 19:21
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BobHoward posted:That's it, that's the main reason Chinese companies like RISC-V. It's just markets and money. As far as I know there's no Chinese company with a world-class ISA design or CPU implementation team yet, but it's a fool's errand to try to stop it from happening. Well, we are trying anyway: https://www.reuters.com/technology/export-controls-hit-chinas-access-arms-chip-designs-ft-2022-12-14/. https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/23/china_arm_tradewar/ Neoverse V2 is already illegal to license to a Chinese company, and ARM is scared that they'll be blocked from licensing other designs in the future. I'm not Hadlock but it's super easy to buy into a "Cold War 2" mindset with all the coverage around this. It's also not like we can restrict any ARM licensing anyway, if a regulation changes then whoever used to be making them will just keep making them without a license. I guess it would dramatically slow down the introduction of new ARM reference designs.
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Dec 24, 2023 15:41
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ConanTheLibrarian posted:What are some worthwhile sites for written articles these days? I'd love to hear other people's recommendations, because it is dire out there now. I'd bet most of these are already familiar to y'all if you've been reading about computers on the internet for a while, but I feel like I might as well list them. The best stuff is still just people's blogs writing about what they're passionate about, like these:
None of those really try to keep up with the news, though. When Raymond mentions hardware it's typically problems with something that was super common and is now widely deployed, and Daniel Lemire absolutely loves AVX-512, which means that he's on a 4 year old laptop because Intel's client division is such a mess that 12th, 13th, and 14th generation parts don't support AVX-512 despite the fact that 10th, 11th, and that one weird 8th gen part, the i3-8121U supported AVX-512. Some bigger corporate publisher sites that still have decent written articles are Digital Foundry, which does written articles to accompany some but not all of their videos. For generalist consumer hardware stuff, I've found that https://www.techpowerup.com/ has stayed mediocre as Tom's and Anandtech became miserable shadows of their former selves. Another old site that has managed to stay mediocre rather than degenerating into ad-ridden drivel is El Reg: https://www.theregister.com/. What else should I be reading? Edit: Oh yeah, Phoronix is still around and doing their thing uncorrupted, which is posting absolutely every Linux-related press release that happens and running their benchmark suite on any hardware that gets sent their way.
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Jan 14, 2024 17:07
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