Re: The trade war changed everything
China doesn't need to get far. I suspect they just want strategic independence.
Beating "the rest of the world" is basically ARM, Intel and AMD - maybe add in nvidia if you're looking at GPUs. Add some already-tested switching tech and off you go. The whole scale-out/cloud push behind linux is going to mean that the infrastructure architectures will apply to x86 or arm or mips. I'd see MIPS doing best as a network-device cpu. IPv6 hardware switching anyone? "Slow" is relative these days. 400mb/s is slow but more than enough for mid-range enterprises' internet link routers. Want to do SDN? Make sure AES is done in hardware and you just need a management interface.
Extending the instruction set doesn't have to be that complex, just enough to mean you can sell fast routers with only a little bit of IP added on. It may not be as power-efficient as ARM, but if it means circumventing Trump's IP ban and being able to sell as much as you want, that's probably not an issue. Worse for the US, homegrown tech deprives the US of the growing market.
For context, Crossbeam were running blade-based backplanes with 120gig throughput based on MIPS years ago.
What happens when all those cheap little 5 port switches from tplink suddenly do 10G with transceivers and have a routing backplane? Or a 48-port switch with a 100Mb/s router - that should be more than enough for many businesses with internet connections.
Cheap normally wins. ARM has done well in unit terms by being cheap. If ARM is excluded from cheap Chinese manufacturing, MIPS has more than a chance to gain some ground because the cost of ARM has basically risen to infinity.
It doesn't matter that China is a bitbehind on tech. If China starts producing RISC phones with no-Google-playstore, it doesn't matter too much if the battery life is less than an iphone 11 pro max. Once the ecosystem is built, it will be tough for the West to make inroads.
The whole consolidation of data-centres is a western commercial thing based on the cost of DC space, electricity, licensing and the employee cost of IT management. I'm not sure those things are a concern in China.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
