Chinese chipmaker Loongson now just three to five years off the pace on the desktop

Chinese chip designer Loongson last week teased products that it claimed will deliver the same performance that Intel and AMD achieved around five years ago. Loongson develops its own instruction set architecture called LoongArch that draws on RISC-V and MIPS and is thought to rely more on the latter. The processors aren't …

[Khaptain]

5 years

If they are currrently 5 years behind then I can imagine that within the next 3 years they will have caught up. They will eventually strike a deal for the fabrication.

I would like to think that it will shake Intel a bit and I pray that Intel drops it's prices. I also wish that China would also go up against Nvidia whos graphics cards now cost more that an entire PC...

[simonlb]

Re: 5 years

I also wish that China would also go up against Nvidia whos graphics cards now cost more that an entire PC...

This. So much this. I know there were wild price fluctuations around the pandemic but it seems like the manufacturers have just said "fuck it" and decided to keep the prices that high because they can.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: 5 years

Why would any manufacturer charge less for anything than they knew they could?

[collinsl]

Re: 5 years

Most likely outcome at this point I'm afraid is mutual export bans between the US/west and China. Second (and quite far away from the first) most likely is China attempts to take Taiwan by force and TSMC is interrupted for months or destroyed, leading to global chip shortages.

[cornetman]

CPUs from 5 years ago were pretty damn powerful. If they could achieve that then I will be very impressed.

Perhaps too obvious to note that most CPUs don't need anywhere near that much power and will do perfectly fine for most applications outside of the data centre.

[Neil Barnes]

To be fair, for most domestic applications, a 486 will do the job...

[PhilipN]

Agreed. I was just about to post : "three to five years .." ...most of my machines are as old or older than that. The only "slow" feature in older kit is the startup time.

[collinsl]

Just built a brand new desktop recently, AMD 7700, PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD etc, still the same bootup time to within a few seconds as my Lenovo X220 from 2011.

These days as long as you have an SSD and a less than 15 year old processor your boot times shouldn't be that great.

[Peshman]

Déjà vu

I'm punting this out again, from what I said almost a year ago on another thread

"Ever since Trump started his nonsense the Chinese have been making huge leaps forward. They built their own space station, landed on the dark side of the moon and started fabbing 7nm chips. If I was the US I'd be fucking terrified of what happens in the next 5 - 10 years."

[RegGuy1]

Re: Déjà vu

It's not "the dark side". I remember I said that about a year ago, too.

[LogicGate]

Re: Déjà vu

Depending on the date of the landing, it cOULD have been the dark side, wherever they landed :)

[Peshman]

Re: Déjà vu

At least you've acknowledged that the relevant part of my comment is still valid.

A year down the line and they're pissing off the Americans so much so that I've been down voted by three people for stating facts.

[jaqian]

Agreed. My desktop of choice is rocking a 4th gen i7 and it's more than powerful enough for my needs.

[Merrill]

So like buying a $150 refurbished desktop from Amazon or Best Buy and running Linux on it?

$150 seems to be the price for the latest pre Windows 11 capable desktops.

I've been thinking about doing that to replace my 9 year old laptop. Anyone have experience doing so?

Of course, I could probably get much of the same performance gain by replacing the hard drive in the laptop with an SSD.

[collinsl]

100% go for the SSD first. Much cheaper than replacing the laptop entirely. And if that doesn't work, you've spent £20 and now have a spare SSD.

[Cryptomuseum]

And what about code efficiency? Why is no one talking about this?

Most code produced is -in fact- a collection of layers 'from the old days' with soft edged icons and nice user interface on top. What about if the Chinese were to go for code optimise? Heck, this can make a lot of difference. My guts feeling says it even may save them 3 nodes of evolution ! (and more secure code on top of this, due to the lesser amount of it)

[Paul Crawford]

You mean not running Windows and copilot on it?

[Roland6]

It is going to be interesting to see whether MS port Windows to it…

[PM.]

no way

where is money in this ?

/ this processor is likely purely for Chinese market /

[Roj Blake]

But the real question is...

...can you run Crysis on one of these CPUs?

[simonlb]

Re: But the real question is...

Crysis? Nah, you want Doom!

[elsergiovolador]

Chips

UK chip technology is still using potatoes in the 7cm process.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Chips

Ah, but does your chippy use proper potatoes, or (e.g.) McCain's 3/8" extruded potato product?

[seven of five]

Re: Chips

If they would, certainly not based on the same imperial measurement. Consider fries based on "11/23 gauge of a reference potato"

[simonlb]

Re: Chips

More importantly, are they cooked in beef dripping? Or failing that, lard? We'll have none of that vegetable oil nonsense here.

[spireite]

5 years behind?

My initial thought is that they are miles behind, but the latest processors of the usual suspects really don't bring anything to the table for normal Joe Public.

AMD and Intel could find themselves Deepin trouble.

[LogicGate]

Re: 5 years behind?

not miles, nanometers

[Irongut]

There is a lot more to CPU performance than the size of your node. If you fabricate an 8086 processor on 7nm it will not be anywhere near as fast as a modern processor.

Show me the benchmarks or stfu.

[Doctor Syntax]

They're talking about desktop so it just spends a smaller %age of its time waiting for the user to press the next key. Not a big issue.

[Roland6]

Compared to todays CPUs those early x86 chips could be described as RISC…

[IGotOut]

Well...

...I'm running an i7 from 6 years ago at its fine running the Affinity suite.

My dad's running an i3 from the same period and again, does what he needs.

So for a lot of people, it will be totally acceptable.