The People's Processor

[WrigleyVillain]

Wired article about the Loongson CPU which has been in development from the ground up by China since 2001. In fact, Richard M Stallman uses a laptop with one because it is presently the only machine on the planet built completely with free software right down to the BIOS.

This is a short and quick but still incredibly interesting article. Major implications not just for computing but potentially all of humanity especially given inevitable continued future shifts in the world geopolitically, economically and militarily.

[DeltZ]

Just hope they don't infringe a thousand copyright/patents and get sued for 50 trillion before it makes it out the door.

[WrigleyVillain]

Well "from the ground up" would avoid such I would think but, again, the article is scant on details.

[Serpentarius]

too bad ... i recall the rights of marketing processor x86 lies on Intel and AMD only
even if they had fab to create it, it could only being used for education purposes and cannot being commercialized (who works for zero profits anyway?)

i dun mind buying if it's good .. afterall 80% mobo are chinese made
but we'll never know if one of these days ... these fellas pop up an insane octo-core (or some-core) prototype chip which cost less than the 1/4 of AMD price

chinese work for real dirt cheap ... the avg monthly salary for china engineers is like US$252 compared to US with $4.7k
these fellas would die for a chance to climb their social darwin ladder

[Serra]

I like that it's powerful enough to run a petaflop computer... you know, because that isn't just a function of quantity. And per the article they actually use them in netbooks, and that reviews aren't in their favor versus other offerings (which I must assume means the Intel Atom).

Given you don't go from Atom performance to even i7 performance in a few short years, I'll take a wake-up call for 2020 when these are useful.