this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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Loongson is MIPS based, so presumably it doesn't rely on any x86 related patents.
I haven't looked at the instruction set, but I've heard it described as being closer to risc-v. Targeting linux (and probably bsd's) is a big w, esp for openkylin adoption in the mainland and displacing the m$ monopoly. I'd really like to get my hands on one of these 6k series soon.
I read that it was derived from MIPS originally, but it's been heavily modified since. I'm very excited about China doubling down on Linux finally.
Me too. GNU + Chinese characteristics lets goooo
They have published documentation of the ISA in english though it's not complete: https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/README-EN.html
gcc and qemu already support la64 so cross compiling and basic testing is already possible for anyone.
damn, that's so cool
Keep in mind gcc even supports the still undocumented instructions (at least in the english world) such as the vector instructions for 128 and 256-bit vector registers. That's probably because people at Loongson were responsible for the implementation. They also maintain their own soft-forked Linux kernel and their patches eventually make it into mainline. Their soft-fork is more bleeding edge though I guess.
Their older chips are indeed MIPS based, but the newer ones (including the ones this article is talking about) are using their own LoongArch ISA, which while has a few similarities to MIPS, is not the same.
Here's some official LoongArch documentation in English and a very nice blog by WÁNG Xuěruì who is quite involved with the porting of quite a few large projects (the Linux kernel itself, Gentoo, LLVM, Rust, and Go) to LoongArch if you're interested in reading up about it.
They're quite solid chips for basic desktop/office use, and even some very light gaming if paired with a compatible graphics card in my testing. Hopefully Loongson can manage to make a dent in the x86(_64) monopoly in a decade or so :)
Ah neat, thanks for the info. Looks like it really is its own thing now, and makes a lot of sense for the use case of moving the government onto domestic tech.
If I'm understanding the article correctly it suggests that this chip is x86_64 compatible?
Loongson has its own instruction set similar to MIPS/RISCV which primarily targets Linux. IIRC there are windows builds that can run on the chip, but that says nothing for most of the windows software which is compiled for for x86/x86_64. Linux shines here because most everything that's open-source can simply be recompiled by anyone and/or made available through binary distribution repos.