China's Latest Loongson CPUs Are On Par With AMD's Excavator

50w at 2GHz for the 4c with IPC equal to excavator all the while on the 12nm process tells me that it's quite far from the actual excavator from AMD which wasn't a stellar architecture.

This alongside the thread in which certain posters hoped to jump into the Chinese cpus must be quite the reality check.
 
For a MIPS64 ISA CPU, this is pretty impressive.
It also features built-in security functions preventing Meltdown and Spectre, which is something Intel has still yet to do with their CPUs (actual hardware fixes, not just soft/firmware fixes).

If these weren't backdoored to hell by that nation's government, it would actually be worth it to give them a spin!
 
Red Falcon said:
It also features built-in security functions preventing Meltdown and Spectre, which is something Intel has still yet to do with their CPUs (actual hardware fixes, not just soft/firmware fixes).

If these weren't backdoored to hell by that nation's government, it would actually be worth it to give them a spin!
Click to expand...

Yes, only the CCP should have unconditional root access :D

This also tracks with China's efforts to bring their supply chains in-house, which will be more and more necessary as they continue their more subtle political 'overtures'. They're already locked out of much of the technology market and very soon will have to 'innovate' on what they've managed to steal and replicate up to this point ;).
 
Revdarian said:
50w at 2GHz for the 4c with IPC equal to excavator all the while on the 12nm process tells me that it's quite far from the actual excavator from AMD which wasn't a stellar architecture.

This alongside the thread in which certain posters hoped to jump into the Chinese cpus must be quite the reality check.
Click to expand...
Not sure I'd knock Chinese manufacturer tenacity.

Back in the '70s and '80s China tech was knocked for being unreliable (mostly due to cheap soldering jobs, but also due to poorly made capacitors). But, on to the '90s their soldering and caps were mostly fine for basic consumer goods and cheap replacement parts. Moving into the '00s, much of their manufacturing processes and base hardware was more then capable for everyday use and all but the most critical applications. From '10s to present day, hearing "Cheap Chinese garbage" is something that's only really uttered by us older folk; sure you can still find complete garbage out of China, but it's mostly short run manufactured goods where low QC was OKed by someone stateside that was looking to turn a quick profit.

China's business philosophy kind of reminds me a lot of Edison; while Tesla might have brought all the great ideas to the table, Edison found some of the best ways to profit off them.
 
I didn’t see it in the article, this is an x86 processor? An actual legit licensed x86 processor? Or something else, like RISC? It doesn’t express sly say it can run Windows and I know China is trying to move to Linux.
 
westrock2000 said:
I didn’t see it in the article, this is an x86 processor? An actual legit licensed x86 processor? Or something else, like RISC? It doesn’t express sly say it can run Windows and I know China is trying to move to Linux.
Click to expand...
Loongson CPUs are using the MIPS64 ISA.
 
Revdarian said:
50w at 2GHz for the 4c with IPC equal to excavator all the while on the 12nm process tells me that it's quite far from the actual excavator from AMD which wasn't a stellar architecture.

This alongside the thread in which certain posters hoped to jump into the Chinese cpus must be quite the reality check.
Click to expand...

Even if the Chinese CPU's miraculously start beating AMD and Intel at half the price, you couldn't pay me to put one in any system I use or any system on my network...
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Even if the Chinese CPU's miraculously start beating AMD and Intel at half the price, you couldn't pay me to put one in any system I use or any system on my network...
Click to expand...

Agreed, it was seriously insane how some posters really wanted in on the action. Bizarro world like.

Edit :

BTW for those praising this, they expect them to use them on laptops, which with those power consumptions seems baffling... And again as bad as bulldozer family was, I'm pretty sure that the mobile versions at 2GHz asked for less power on a worse process node.
 
Skull_Angel said:
Not sure I'd knock Chinese manufacturer tenacity.

Back in the '70s and '80s China tech was knocked for being unreliable (mostly due to cheap soldering jobs, but also due to poorly made capacitors). But, on to the '90s their soldering and caps were mostly fine for basic consumer goods and cheap replacement parts. Moving into the '00s, much of their manufacturing processes and base hardware was more then capable for everyday use and all but the most critical applications. From '10s to present day, hearing "Cheap Chinese garbage" is something that's only really uttered by us older folk; sure you can still find complete garbage out of China, but it's mostly short run manufactured goods where low QC was OKed by someone stateside that was looking to turn a quick profit.

China's business philosophy kind of reminds me a lot of Edison; while Tesla might have brought all the great ideas to the table, Edison found some of the best ways to profit off them.
Click to expand...

I have no doubt they are improving, but as long as they are a repressive authoritarian regime that engages in state sponsored industrial and other espionage, I won't touch digital products designed there with a 39.5 ft pole.

Wake me when they become a multi-party liberal democracy.
 
Revdarian said:
50w at 2GHz for the 4c with IPC equal to excavator all the while on the 12nm process tells me that it's quite far from the actual excavator from AMD which wasn't a stellar architecture.
Click to expand...

These are on 28 nm
Both 3A4000 and 3B4000 employ the GS464V microarchitecture and are built on STMicroelectronics' 28nm FD-SOI
Click to expand...

Next set of chips are going to be on 12nm

Loongson has already plotted the path for next year. The chipmaker expects to introduce the quad-core 3A5000 and 16-core 3C5000 chips to the Chinese market. The new processors would be based on a more up-to-date 12nm manufacturing process and come clocked up to 2.5 GHz.
Click to expand...
 
Ha, arm will never supercede x86. Arm fans have been saying that for so long it was mentioned in the movie hackers. Give it up.

X86 is going to stay for as long as humans have to write code that cares at all what the CPU arch is that runs on it or that interpreters can't jit compile code to run as fast as precompiled. But by then, arm will be just as complicated as x86 and in both cases the cpu's themselves interpret something else entirely, with x86 /arm assembly actually being just another abstraction layer (already the case for modern CPUs).

Tldr, x86 until nobody cares
 
Darth Ender said:
Ha, arm will never supercede x86. Arm fans have been saying that for so long it was mentioned in the movie hackers. Give it up.
Click to expand...
I don't recall ARM being specifically mentioned in that movie. RISC was mentioned but was used as a bad play on words. :p
Despite ARM being based on RISC, I think in the context of that scene they were referring to the Power PC chips that Apple was starting to use on their computers at the time.
 
True it was risc specifically, but the drive behind arm is that it is risc based and thus presumed less weighed down by the historic backwards compatibly baggage inherent with x86

The same arguments then were made against x86 and failed as are being made currently with arm and any number of less commonly used Archs. They too will not replace x86.

What keeps x86 where it is at is momentum and the only thing that can change the direction of that momentum is an automatic and transparent translation layer and a gradual move away from learning/needing to code to things that are arch specific.

Dethroning x86 will be less about efficiency, since that argument has never worked, and more about security and expansion into future changes in computing
 
Red Falcon said:
Loongson CPUs are using the MIPS64 ISA.
Click to expand...

Which based on limiting myself to half a dozen google searches, means there is hardly any mainstream operating system support for this platform. The article does specifically mention server environments. For consumers that need productivity, I think AMD & Intel will be just fine for now.
 
Darth Ender said:
True it was risc specifically, but the drive behind arm is that it is risc based and thus presumed less weighed down by the historic backwards compatibly baggage inherent with x86

The same arguments then were made against x86 and failed as are being made currently with arm and any number of less commonly used Archs. They too will not replace x86.

What keeps x86 where it is at is momentum and the only thing that can change the direction of that momentum is an automatic and transparent translation layer and a gradual move away from learning/needing to code to things that are arch specific.

Dethroning x86 will be less about efficiency, since that argument has never worked, and more about security and expansion into future changes in computing
Click to expand...

But to be honest, even x86 has already abandoned x86. Modern x86 designs are a hybrid CISC/RISC design that maintain compatibility via various abstraction layer designs.

x86 is king, not because there is anything inherently better about x86, the opposite is probably true, but rather because it has been around so long that continuous incremental improvements have optimized it so well that compared to other designs which are pretty much starting from scratch (ARM is further along, but has still had much less development and refinement work put into it over the years) you wind up comparing a very mature design to a design in its infancy.

It should be no surprise that we can do better than an instruction set developed mostly manually in the 70s when computers were very different than they are today, but it will require a lot of work to get any such instruction set over the hump where it is mature enough to be competitive.

Especially given how most software is written for x86.

Ideally something like RISC-V will succeed, or maybe even MIPS64, as they are open standards, so we won't have to deal with all of the stupid licensing issues with Intel and ARM holdings.
 
westrock2000 said:
Which based on limiting myself to half a dozen google searches, means there is hardly any mainstream operating system support for this platform. The article does specifically mention server environments. For consumers that need productivity, I think AMD & Intel will be just fine for now.
Click to expand...

Keep in mind most software development these days takes place in very high level languages, so once compilers start supporting other instruction sets, things really move fast, unlike in the old days when people were manually managing memory addresses in C, or the really old days of hand optimized machine code, COBOL and Fortran...
 
Verge said:
Eh, the chinese business philosophy is basically... steal, replicate to a decent state, dump on global market.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tr...class-chips-china-got-them-anyway-11561646798
Click to expand...
It really depends on what the vendor/marketer wants out of the manufacturer. Chinese businessmen do seem to have trouble understanding why "normal" people would want quality goods, but if their retailer/vendor insists on it, they will work to reach their QA needs (and can reach it in most cases these days). On rare occasions, you do get an incomplete product because a critical redundancy was cut out for not being understood, but that's more on the vendor/marketer for not realizing it rather than the manufacturer.
 
Revdarian said:
50w at 2GHz for the 4c with IPC equal to excavator all the while on the 12nm process tells me that it's quite far from the actual excavator from AMD which wasn't a stellar architecture.
Click to expand...

I went out and looked at the Excavator pages on Wikipedia. There were no desktop Excavators released in 2015--only one, the Athlon II 865 x4, in 2016, and the Bristol Ridges in 2017, and the article says "Hu goes on to mention that processor's performance is comparable to that of AMD's 28nm Excavator parts, which launched in 2015." If we consider Excavators released in 2015, we're talking 2C4T mobile APUs (Carrizo). The best of those was the A12-8800B, which ran at 2.1GHz base and 3.4GHz turbo.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Yes, only the CCP should have unconditional root access :D

This also tracks with China's efforts to bring their supply chains in-house, which will be more and more necessary as they continue their more subtle political 'overtures'. They're already locked out of much of the technology market and very soon will have to 'innovate' on what they've managed to steal and replicate up to this point ;).
Click to expand...
Yeah, China should've remained as low cost labor for the US and rest of the western world, how dare they.
 
M76 said:
Yeah, China should've remained as low cost labor for the US and rest of the western world, how dare they.
Click to expand...
More like, how dare the US and the rest of the world exploit their own countries, companies, and people by using the low cost labor of China.
How dare they.
 
Auer said:
So are fake Ryzen chips a common thing yet?
Click to expand...

Chinas AMD deal fell through. The US placed some restrictions on companies AMD setup in china to handle patent extensions.

They have Loongson. Their Chinese designed MIPS play we are talking about.
They have Zhaoxin. Their collaboration with VIA. (Which is now owned by a Chinese company.) This is probably their most main stream play right now. They are currently shipping 16nm x86 CPUs that are on par with 3-5 year old Intel/AMD parts complete with all x86 extensions ect. 100% Chinese designs at this point... their first products 4 or 5 years ago where basically old die shrunk VIA designs. They have a 7nm part that should be shipping this year which should bring them up to around zen/zen+ performance (probably... I would expect that to get adjusted down but it will still be used in tons of chinese market machines)
They have Rockchip working on ARM designs.
They have Sunway which will likely never touch commercial products... its the arch China uses for their Government super computers.

I'm pretty sure they have at least 3 or 4 other companies working on various ARM and MIPS designs for low power cheap stuff. Huawei is still licencing ARM stuff despite US embargos... but I wouldn't be shocked to see the Chinese put even more investment into MIPS designs for smart phones. Them decoupling from Google will only make it even easier for them to swap out their ARM cpus for MIPS.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top