• CCCP Enjoyer@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      4 months ago

      I haven't looked at the instruction set, but I've heard it described as being closer to risc-v. Targeting linux (and probably bsd's) is a big w, esp for openkylin adoption in the mainland and displacing the m$ monopoly. I'd really like to get my hands on one of these 6k series soon.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
        hexagon
        ·
        4 months ago

        I read that it was derived from MIPS originally, but it's been heavily modified since. I'm very excited about China doubling down on Linux finally.

      • FuckBigTech347@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        4 months ago

        They have published documentation of the ISA in english though it's not complete: https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/README-EN.html

        gcc and qemu already support la64 so cross compiling and basic testing is already possible for anyone.

    • peace_land_bread@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      Their older chips are indeed MIPS based, but the newer ones (including the ones this article is talking about) are using their own LoongArch ISA, which while has a few similarities to MIPS, is not the same.

      Here's some official LoongArch documentation in English and a very nice blog by WÁNG Xuěruì who is quite involved with the porting of quite a few large projects (the Linux kernel itself, Gentoo, LLVM, Rust, and Go) to LoongArch if you're interested in reading up about it.

      They're quite solid chips for basic desktop/office use, and even some very light gaming if paired with a compatible graphics card in my testing. Hopefully Loongson can manage to make a dent in the x86(_64) monopoly in a decade or so :)

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
        hexagon
        ·
        4 months ago

        Ah neat, thanks for the info. Looks like it really is its own thing now, and makes a lot of sense for the use case of moving the government onto domestic tech.