Chinese semiconductor industry

TK3600 said:

How does banning export even work? Loongson is going to be sold to Chinese consumers right? Won't it by definition be too loose to control?

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Different from Intel and AMD, Loongson chips are not in high supply, my guess, and they are mainly used in the goverment, they sell prebuilt PCs but the main buyer is still the Chinese goverment who is in a hurry to localize their goverment computer systems. So it could make sense for the goverment to limit the selling of those chips to third parties.

tokenanalyst said:

Different from Intel and AMD, Loongson chips are not in high supply, my guess, and they are mainly used in the goverment, they sell prebuilt PCs but the main buyer is still the Chinese goverment who is in a hurry to localize their goverment computer systems. So it could make sense for the goverment to limit the selling of those chips to third parties.

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Are you sure that Chinese gov't is only able to buy them? Loongson is reporting losses all the time. I see them rarely winning bidding for domestic chip procurement.

I see no reason why Chinese gov't can't buy Hygon/Phytium CPUs with Kylin OS. After all, they use Phytium and Sunway chips for super computers.

China Mobile's subsidiary Xinsheng technology is releasing RISC-V chips for LTE Cat.1 bis and NB IoT.

CM6620 looks to have very low energy consumption and same with CM8610 (uses 22nm process).

How does Hygon compare vs Loongson? If one is clearly better what is the point of other?

Many Americans are having China syndrome. Just don't ever mention anything China.

KYli said:

Many Americans are having China syndrome. Just don't ever mention anything China.

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Now they realize even older chips can satisfy most of the world's chips applications. All countries will benefit from Chinese chips, if the US uses chips as coercive weapons.

KYli said:

Many Americans are having China syndrome. Just don't ever mention anything China.

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It's Austin Powers.

America lost its mojo, and cannot get it back.

They resort to banning everything in sight, anything China tech related, in the hopes that buys them time to regain their lost mojo.

Will that work?

It will probably work just as well as the Trump trade war, possibly even better than that, bigly.

Yeah, baby.

TK3600 said:

How does Hygon compare vs Loongson? If one is clearly better what is the point of other?

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Hygon is x86 based and Loongson is MIPS/Loongson Arch. Supposely some chinese entity owns the MIPS arch now but nearly no one uses MIPS/Loongson. I believe Playstation or Nintendo a few generation back was the last global hurrah. No one seems to completely understand how and what type of agreement China has with x86 license/patents. Some have expire so its free to use, some are cross license from AMD/VIA etc. Either way, the benchmark for both seem to indicate that they are about 5-10 years behind current Intel/Amd chips in performance.

x86 is a patent minefield. It is highly unlikely that a Chinese x86 processor could be exported.
If you only use expired patents you would end with something like a Pentium III.

tphuang said:

Are you sure that Chinese gov't is only able to buy them? Loongson is reporting losses all the time. I see them rarely winning bidding for domestic chip procurement.

I see no reason why Chinese gov't can't buy Hygon/Phytium CPUs with Kylin OS. After all, they use Phytium and Sunway chips for super computers.

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You are correct, they have not done greatly recently. They may counting in the more recent controllable domestic ISA LoongArch to incite more goverment purchases on the grounds that is more secure for the goverment than this two processors companies that depend on ARM and X64-86 ISAs that are not controlled by China. Also LoongArch claims to be pretty compatible with X86 using translation so it could minimize the cost of porting domestic software.