Also from the top of that page I learned that "Loongson" means "Dragon Core" which to me as a westerner makes it sound very clearly Chinese (because dragons) but also a lot cooler (because ... dragons!). Nice.
I would like to see actual benchmarks though.
The third generation is noisy because it is in a small format case and with very deficient ventilation that I can't solve.
Would work wonders, I guess.
Except it's a custom ISA (fork of MIPS). It could be fine for Chromebook-like use cases (basically web browser machine), but not really for anything more serious ...
It got a lot of attention among my hacker space fellows, but I don't remember why. Was it an open hw design or something?
It was a MIPS little endian, which is also very good. I can't remember if it was fanless or not.
"The world's first fully free software. All system source files(BIOS, kernel, drivers etc.) are free software, no close firmware needed." [0]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160703160118/http://zkml.lemot...
They seem pretty expensive for how weak they are, so probably not much point in buying them besides to play around with the architecture.
> Entities on the Entity List are prohibited from purchasing or licensing American technologies, even indirectly. For example, Loongson can't have its CPUs manufactured by American equipment, ruling out most foundries with modern nodes.
According to https://www.techspot.com/news/97817-us-blacklists-china-loon...
It may sound irrational to ask this kind of question, but marketing killed the meaning of "nm" a long time ago. As reference, through electron microscope the sizes of Intel 14nm seems equivalent to AMD.TSMC 7nm [1]
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/272489/intel-14-nm-node-compared...
However 7nm is in volume production at a level so high that can do non-critical projects such as the Mate 60 phone rather than just the stuff where all imports to China are sanctioned (high-end AI chips, chips for spacefaring, and military).
Likely other sanctioned Chinese chip designers will use the process as it appears that Chinese authorities want internal competition rather than just have one single dominant company (Huawei).
But that's probably why Loongson isn't on it, capacity is probably being spent on Huawei's next chip.
