• redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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    9 months ago

    But RISC-V is royalty-free and already supported by Linux and most compiler toolchains. Surely adopting it is more profitable because they don’t need to maintain their own fork of Linux kernel and compiler toolchains to support their custom CPU architecture.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Loongarch is a few years ahead of RISC-V atm. the fastest RV cores are comparable to ARM A53 (Raspberry pi 3-ish) whilst Loongarch is comparable to Intel Core 10th generation.

      I think its a sunk cost thing. Loongarch was set in motion before RISC-V International was established in a neutral country, and now they’d be giving up a faster proprietary ISA for one that’s much slower atm.

      The fact Alibaba is putting their money on RISC-V is probably enough of a sign that Loongarch will likely have a short-lived time at the top of the Chinese DIY processor stack.