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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

>I think, many Linux enthusiasts would be thrilled to run an alternative CPU platform.

forget Linux enthusiasts. Whole countries, like Russia or China, have national security interest in it - beside everything else, Intel chips has VNC server built-in on the silicon :). China has been making great progress in building its national computing platform, though not sure whether it has reached the desktops of their government employees. Wrt. Russia - it again lifted the ban on buying foreign hardware for security services, time to upgrade has come again i guess :) I mean, even such guaranteed markets and money available is still not enough to even come close to Intel.

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Russia mostly uses SPARC: an ISA used from embedded to high-end NUMA's that was first to open up. Their mainframe CPU's are called Elbrus. Fujitsu has their own that they work with Oracle on. There's also a MIPS company. They also cloned and improved Itanium but sold that to Intel. Reason they avoid ARM, like I tell everyone else to, is that ARM charges huge licensing fees (up to $10mil I hear) with royalties. MIPS charges around $700-900k. SPARC requires a $99 registration fee. See why Japs and Russians use SPARC? ;)

The Chinese first, powerful CPU was an Alpha clone called Shinwei. Their next one was MIPS line called Loongson (or Godson). It supports x86 emulation at hardware level. So, that MIPS CPU is their main strategy for getting off Intel. I don't know if Russians have a strategy for that. But that's what the two are doing in terms of CPU's.

EDIT: China also built its own state-of-the-art fabs with a 28nm coming online recently. The Russians have fabs but not that many or that good that I know. That's two areas they should worry about.

Russia seems to be not very interested in ARM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal_CPU

VNC on silicon? Do you have sources for that?

It has different names. AMT is one of the earliest implementations.

There is a separate chip with its own OS, connecting to the video chip and the nic. No driver needed. Can not be permanently removed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vPro#VNC-based_KVM_remot...

http://www.meshcommander.com/meshcommander as a client to the Intel AMT and maybe ME, which if you do some more research, you'll see is indeliby baked into most newer Intel hardware.

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