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Comment by tianqi | Hacker News Reader

So what are the alternatives? Based on current information it seems that there are no domestic product in China that are comparable to these mainstream CPUs.

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https://www.tomshardware.com/news/loongson-launches-3a6000-c... they have this, which is apparently comparable to an Intel Core i3, which is probably good enough for most government work.

Well, the hardware, yes. But you are expected to compile your own software... Windows doesn't exist on Longsoon (AFAIK), and no notable distro have ready made image, nor package repository for this arch (not in the west at least. Are there such in China?). You can make it work with not a lot of effort of course, but I wonder if this is really what government folks do in their lunch break.

The Chinese government uses Kylin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system)

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

UOS reportedly supports Loongson as of 2019 https://cntechpost.com/2019/12/16/china-made-operating-syste...

Though I found this post from last month https://bbs.chinauos.com/phone/zh/post/17586 where someone complains that UOS isn't updating to Loongson ABI2.0 quickly enough.

Wikipedia says Loongson is used as the MIPS target of both Debian's and Go's continuous integration systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#Operating_systems

Current Chinese CPUs have half the performance of current Intel/AMD ones.

That's pretty good, especially for office work.

Office computers do not need high end CPUs. In fact, I know that several places have so old computers (with Intel chips) that they are probably slower than modern day Chinese processors.

They went hard with ARM, while developing RISC on the side. So perhaps something like this: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/motherboards/firs...

I was sort of expecting at least one RISC V CPU to be on the list, but I guess we're still several years out from competing w/ Intel or ARM designs. And there's significant investment in MIPS toolchains, so maybe RV64 isn't quite ready for prime time in China?

Alibaba Group is promising server grade RISC-V this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776337

Which is why it's weird the CCP is offering no regulatory love to a CPU developed and fabbed in mainland China.

I don't assume the left and right hands are coordinated: Alibaba only announced that a few days ago, and the CPU isn't actually available yet.

Huawei ARM chips were pretty good. Now that they have 7nm out, a ARM Linux PC seems feasible.

It needs to be fabricated by TSMC. Domestic fabrication capabilities haven't caught up yet and are currently at the same level as Taiwan, SK, and the US around 2014.

7nm chips are fabricated in China by SMIC. It is used in latest Huawei 5G phones. They may also be able to make 5nm in near future. Beyond that I don't know.

The Huawei ARM chips are progression. They are not good. They are several years behind in performance.

Is several years behind that large gap? I think most apps/infra are fine to run on 10yo hardware

6 or 7. Fine for consumers.

From observation of the Chinese government, I'm pretty sure they already have an alternative to these Intel CPUs. They're just creating the legal framework to require their use.

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