this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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What relevant x86-64 patents do AMD & Intel still hold, and if any, is Loongson somehow getting around some or all of them?
Loongson is MIPS based, so presumably it doesn't rely on any x86 related patents.
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.