Chinese CPUs to feature in servers made by sanctioned Russian company

If you have an enormous appetite for risk, we have just the hardware for you, from Russian outfit Norsi-Trans, powered by China’s Loongson. Norsi-Trans bills itself as making “the best hardware and software solutions network systems and business intelligence and production of server equipment for data storage and network …

[Filippo]

All true I guess, but...

1) "Not the most capable server" is much better than "not a server", which is what you get if you don't have CPUs.

2) "Four generations behind the best Intel/AMD" is pretty good. It's not pocket calculators. It's plenty enough for most tasks, especially if they are parallelizable (just use more of them), as many modern workloads are.

3) It's money that goes into Loongson's coffers, and which they'll use to make better CPUs in the future.

4) It's "four generations behind" now, but what will it be a few years from now? Catching up is always much easier than innovating.

Overall, being dismissive about this sounds like short-term thinking to me.

[An_Old_Dog]

Catching Up

I'll take some issue with your item #4. Look at the old USSR's computer hardware situation: they spent all that time and trouble cloning IBM System/360s and DEC PDP-11s, and they're still behind. They built, and tried selling, an Apple II clone ... for USD 17K (or was it 22K?). I think it's more effective to do your own innovation (they've got plenty of bright people).

[Filippo]

Re: Catching Up

A good point. However, back then, CPU advancement was really fast, with Moore's Law in full swing, every R&D department running and running across open fields. Nowadays, not so much. I'm not saying it's easier, or harder, but it's not the same context. I guess time will tell?

[Danny 14]

4 generations behind? Thats fine. That puts it in the early xeon range so dell x10 era's. very capable servers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pentium 90 anyone?

>>> silicon is about four generations behind the best Intel or AMD has to offer.

Next time the guys at your computer shop try to sell you a 4Q 2023 "Raptor Lake" (Gen 13), just tell them you'd rather have a bunch of 4Q 2018 "Coffee Lake".

And then look at their face. Especially the prices were approx the same at the time.

Some China fanboys really pushing it here.

[Mockup1974]

Whatever happened to Russia's own Elbrus2k ISA?

[DustFox]

American is taking the west down with her

The U.S is unbelievably stupid, hypocrite and warmonger... Those words are enough

[Securitymoose]

One almost feels sorry for them

In my experience of components from that part of the world, if they work at all, they work just fine until the warranty expires...