Chinese Loongson 3C6000 CPUs now have heat spreaders with words in Cyrillic?

Chinese Loongson 3C6000 CPUs now have heat spreaders with words in Cyrillic?

  • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    5 days ago

    It takes 5 years to develop a new processor architecture. Or rather it USED to take 5 years.
    That also about the time it took to for instance make the original Ryzen CPU.
    But that development rested on a lot of know how already in house, and a lot of experience with making x86/a64 type architectures.

    Of course it’s possible you can make an architecture in 11 months, but definitely not based on anything close to a modern production process, which alone takes 6 months from tape-out to initial production! And it’s obviously not possible to make anything remotely close to the sophistication of a modern high end CPU. At least not from scratch.

    But it might be possible to have their own version of an already existing design, maybe even with some customizations.
    So no different that what dozens of companies around the world are making routinely, when they license for instance from Arm.

    Edit:
    Just to clarify, it takes LONGER to make new chips today than originally, because the complexity is increasing, and it takes way longer to make test samples on the new more complex production processes.

    • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
      31·
      5 days ago

      No point to a new architecture, just use RISC-V. Doing your own CPU chip is mostly about fab, I expect.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        I don’t think a finished RISC-V design is available ready to use, you would have to design it from the ground up just as with any other chip. To have such shortcuts, you need to license from Arm.

        • zarenki@lemmy.mlEnglish
          31·
          5 days ago

          There are plenty of RISC-V cores available on the market for SoC vendors to license and use. So many that they even outnumber the SoCs using them.

          Several RISC-V SoC vendors design their own cores and license those core designs out for other vendors to use in their own SoCs (T-Head, SpacemiT, Tenstorrent), some are focused entirely on core designs that they sell and don’t currently make SoCs themselves (SiFive, etc.), and countless open-source RISC-V cores exist online.

          StarFive, ESWIN, and Sophgo are some of the companies that make RISC-V processors/SoCs but which don’t actually “design it from the ground up” since they license the CPU core design from either SiFive or T-Head. Similar to how most ARM SoC vendors license the ARM Cortex CPU cores.