
China plans national, unified CPU architecture  - evo_9
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/127791-china-plans-national-unified-cpu-architecture
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blhack
Does anybody want to see why China can't innovate?

This is such a stupid idea that it sounds like something out of a novel
warning against the evils of big government.

Innovation comes from many competing ideas, not one idea to rule them all.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I don't know if the rest of the world is doing much better by allowing
(W)intel to have a stranglehold on the computer chip market.

This does sound like one of the many boondoggles that governments oversee, but
I'd say there's still a role for big government in this area, setting proper
RAND-Z standards, busting cartels, supporting open source and the like.

~~~
sk5t
Have we forgotten about AMD, VIA, ARM, and PPC just to start?

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nextparadigms
If they choose ARM, Intel will be crushed. Not necessarily because they will
lose 30% market share or whatever, but because ARM will get that much more
popular as an alternative to Intel (and AMD) chips, and the idea that ARM
could replace Intel's chips in pretty much anything will get that much closer
to reality, especially with recent news that ARM Nvidia chips will be used in
supercomputers.

Another interesting choice is MIPS, which I'd also like to see rise as a 3rd
alternative to ARM and x86, but I heard ARM, AMD and Google are considering
buying MIPS.

~~~
thristian
The Chinese Academy of Sciences already has he MIPS-compatible Loongson
architecture; RMS uses a Loongson-based laptop because it's the only device
that's completely Free from the BIOS upwards.

I've heard the latest Loongson chips have support for executing 'some' x86
instructions in hardware, though, so perhaps practicality will beat purity
after all.

~~~
KaeseEs
Calling a Loongsoon laptop more free than other available alternatives is a
downright Orwellian perversion of language. I understand the specific meaning
of 'free' you are using, but juxtaposing such speech with China's horrific
human rights record (and non-state and quasi-state terrible labor practices,
top to bottom) is chilling.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Is it not equally Orwellian that I read a comment like this every time RMS's
choice of laptop gets mentioned, yet hardly ever hear it at any other time?
It's as if China's human rights record only matters when someone wants to make
fun of RMS or complain about Apple, yet our entire modern way of life is built
on Chinese manufacturing.

~~~
KaeseEs
No, that is indeed not Orwellian - are you familiar with what the term means
in the context of language? Calling something 'free', the purchase of which is
detrimental to the freedom of many human beings by strengthening those who
keep them in fetters, is akin to Newspeak from 1984, wherein words and phrases
assumed meanings contradictory to their normal denotation. The situation you
seem to see, wherein you assume that people use China as a handy stick with
which to beat those they dislike for other reasons, has little or nothing to
do with this. Words mean things, and we should all do our part to use them
meaningfully - George Orwell would approve. :)

Incidentally, I don't know why your recollection of complaints about China's
atrocious human rights record skews towards the (rather few) complaints that
are on HN about RMS' choice of laptop, or about the Apple/Foxconn dustup
(which incidentally caught several other companies to a lesser extent), but
it's not really germane to the conversation at hand.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I was actually thinking of the Two Minute Hate from the same book, and how the
ritualised anger aimed at external enemies was used to distract from the
reality of their own existence.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate>

And as I said, I don't understand why China's human rights record is more
germane to this particular conversation sub-thread. You could have replied at
the top level to rail against China, but you replied instead to the apparently
irresistible irony of someone wishing to have a chinese made laptop with Free
Software rather than a chinese made laptop without. Which suggests to me at
least that people may be struggling to cope with the idea that pretty much
everything is made in China and would rather pretend that their non-longsoon
CPU device is in some way morally superior.

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zdw
Interesting that they're not considering Sparc, which already has open cores
out there and pre-Oracle Sun was quite supportive of.

Probably historical inertial though.

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ZeroGravitas
It's an interesting concept, but a terrible article e.g.

 _"The primary reason for this move is to lessen China’s reliance on western
intellectual property.

There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS,
Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU — but the Chinese leadership has also
mooted the idea of defining an entirely new architecture."_

So it's going to avoid foreign IP by choosing a chip archecture 4/5 of which
depend on foreign IP, or building one of it's own that (given the crazy world
of IP) will almost certainly inspire lawsuits from the incumbents. That makes
no sense.

If IP is the issue why not cut out the middle-man and just compulsory licence
any patents that cover national standards? I'd heard that China was
threatening to do this previously and it's an entirely sensible thing that
every country should do even if would enrage the current monopolist cartels.

~~~
latch
You are joking, right? You think the incumbents are going to sue China for IP
theft? In what court?

~~~
jws
They could block exports.

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dublinclontarf
This is just a protectionist move (excuse) to prop up a Chinese company.

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jcr
"The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create
yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No
amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using
untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I
picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program
such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of
program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well
installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."

\-- Ken Thompson - Reflections On Trusting Trust

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bradfa
"at $5 million for a single Cortex-A9 core license, it’s unlikely that ARM
will be China’s choice. The Power ISA is cheaper, but lacks the software
ecosystems that ARM and MIPS enjoy"

I'm confused by these two sentences. $5 million is pocket change for a
government, why would that cost for a license be putting China off? I
understand that ARM is "western IP" but then why bring up the cost?

And what ecosystem do MIPS and ARM have that Power doesn't? OK, unreleased
versions of the next desktop / server Windows will run on ARM, but where's the
MIPS part? I view Power, MIPS, and ARM all about the same in regards to
software ecosystems.

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kghose
The old tendencies surface again ...

But seriously, uniformity in tech is sometimes good (standards) but standards
can also constrain innovation. Standards are good in a mature industry. Is CPU
design a mature industry? Kind of I guess.

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outside1234
the interesting move here would be if they choose ARM because of the
implications on Intel.

The software reality though is increasingly, who cares? I don't know what runs
underneath the last two phones I had (well, I do, but as a developer I didn't
need to know).

