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Motherboards and systems with China's Loongson CPUs now shipping to US customers — options start from $373 for a DTX board with processor and cooler (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

damn, that's so cool

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Me too. GNU + Chinese characteristics lets goooo