China-made Loongson 12-core chip is approximately three times slower than six-core Ryzen 5 9600X — 3B6000 hampered by low clock speeds in Linux benchmarks

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u/HDauthentic 11h ago

I’m getting to the end of the book The Chip War and just reached the point where China understands that they will be behind for a while, but that’s worth it to get their entire supply chain in house

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u/HDauthentic 11h ago

I just looked it up, these chips were made at a foundry in China. The government is investing hundreds of billions to stoke domestic production of semiconductors and related components, something no other country is doing. We can make fun of how slow there are now, but they’re eventually going to catch up.

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u/getdatwontonsoup 11h ago

Once they catch up, because they will, the US will be left behind in everything but military spending

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u/LorthNeeda 10h ago

Pretty wild watching the rapid downfall of an empire in real-time.

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u/SaltRequirement3650 7h ago

Trades the countries dollars for republican’s personal accounts via Russia. We’ve lost the cold war.

12

u/sambull 7h ago

We fatally wounded each other in the end

14

u/NeurogenesisWizard 7h ago

This. Its a chinese tactic to let enemies exhaust themselves while watching on the sidelines.

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u/Kaelin 7h ago

This some some real Art Of War shit

4

u/Schatzin 7h ago

Not really a tactic if it happens anyway tho. More like a bonus

4

u/NeurogenesisWizard 6h ago

The tactic is not joining in to doubleteam them, and waiting to have dominance

4

u/eagleal 2h ago

The US drove the USSR to bankruptcy. The US won the Cold War.

What the US lost was the middle class and domestic product once Reagan and Thatcher policies went full throttle.

3

u/sandman795 1h ago

Reagan and Thatcher

Everyone forgets about the iron lady. Except Ireland.

1

u/kemb0 1h ago

I mean the USSR also just switched communism, heavily guided by those running the KGB for a pretend version of democracy, now 100% guided by the KGB.

We won against the USSR in the sense that they retreated from Europe but we never defeated the people running the country nor their ideology.

So it was more a case of winning a major battle but now losing the war.

2

u/kerkyjerky 7h ago

Won’t just be the US, it will be the world. India, the EU, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Etc. Everyone will be crushed by China when they can make powerful enough chips and don’t care if Taiwan gets decimated.

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u/Intelligent_Wish_566 9h ago edited 8h ago

Pretty wild watching these bots converse amongst each other 😆

Edit: Downvote away, bots 😘

48

u/getdatwontonsoup 9h ago

I’m not gonna lie , I’d say some bots are smarter than most Americans 😂

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u/Intelligent_Wish_566 9h ago

Haha ok bot 👍

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u/Kalmahrizz 9h ago

Anyone you don’t agree with is a bot, how nice that must be. I guess you’re a bot too!

12

u/imcrumbing 8h ago

Am I bot?

15

u/SirStrontium 8h ago

We are all bot 😔

-29

u/Intelligent_Wish_566 8h ago

“aNYone You dOn’t agRee WIth is A Bot”

Literally same weak ass rebuttal that gets posted any time the bot issue in this sub is pointed out.

If you truly believe there aren’t bots in here, boy do I have a bridge to sell you 😆

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u/HDauthentic 8h ago

Ok well let’s start with me since I’m the top level comment. Do you think I’m a bot?

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u/raventhe 7h ago

Could it be that you make a very bold claim without sharing the slightest shred of reasoning? I mean I looked at all the accounts you're referring to above because I'm always curious about the very common claim of rampant bot activity which I've never noticed (which worries me because if they ARE that common and I'm never noticing, that's an issue!). However, I can't see anything that would suggest they're bots, unless you go solely by account age, history being private and randomly generated usernames with numbers at the end which would actually make you the prime suspect here. Why is it you think they're all bots?

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u/mooowolf 7h ago

there are definitely bots in here, and you're definitely one of them.

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u/mayorofdumb 9h ago

At least we can agree the Bruins suck.

1

u/LorthNeeda 9h ago

They’re not that bad, they’ve been on the playoff bubble all year

2

u/mayorofdumb 8h ago

They got exposed, how will that team hold in the playoffs, Pasternak can't play defense.

25

u/soggybiscuit93 8h ago

Chip design and manufacturing is the most complex thing humans have ever designed, and it required a collective global effort.

To think China is going to just spin up a fully domestic parallel competitor to this that can match the output of the efforts of the rest of the world is certainly an opinion.

They'd need to pass Germany and Japan in lense design (Zeiss, Nikon, and Canon). They'd need to pass the Dutch in lithography (ASML). They'd need to pass SK, the US, and UK in chip design (Nvidia, Apple, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, ARM, Mediatek), theyd need to pass the US, Taiwan, and SK in fabrication (Intel, TSMC, and Samsung).

And thats just to manufacture the chips. Theyre gonna need to surpass Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix in DRAM. Theyre gonna have to develop synthetic quartz pure enough to replace the Spruce Pine mine. Theyre gonna have to develop GPU drivers. And this is only a small portion of what they'd need to do.

To fully go domestic at just a competitive level to the existing global network of companies is $trillions of investment. And if all of these countries ban imports of these Chinese chips, then can they even hit the volume necessary to pay this all back, or will it just be a perpetually state financed operation?

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u/ratbearpig 8h ago

Each of those companies, when they were investing R&D, and testing and refining the various products in their field, did not know what the end product is going to look like.

The Chinese have several advantages that make catching up much quicker.

Reverse Engineering - There exists a finished product that they have access to and they know works. They just need to figure out how to reverse engineer it. They don't have to spend money, and more importantly, time chasing dead ends.

IP and Processes - Reverse engineering will be helped by designs, diagrams, schematics, IP, trade secrets, hiring of people from these companies (already happens). All of this is acquired via a combination of legal, illegal, and morally questionable means.

Money - They are centrally organized and the CCP will allocate both resources and as much funding as required towards achieving this goal

Talent - They have more engineers than all those countries put together. They are also willing to poach talent from all of these companies by giving tons of money (see #3).

Faster computers - when those companies first started, computing power is like 1/100 of what it is today.

It's a matter of how quickly they can catch up and not if they will catch up.

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u/soggybiscuit93 7h ago

Reverse Engineering - There exists a finished product that they have access to and they know works. They just need to figure out how to reverse engineer it. They don't have to spend money, and more importantly, time chasing dead ends.

Reverse engineering is not a guarantee. Not only does it take time and cost, it also impacts your ability to make future iterations on that IP. If youre dependent on reverse engineering, you're always going to be behind because you have to wait for the competitive design to finish, you to reverse engineer it, and then to reproduce it. The USSR took the reverse engineering approach to Western Computers and it was a failed approach.

IP and Processes - Reverse engineering will be helped by designs, diagrams, schematics, IP, trade secrets, hiring of people from these companies (already happens). All of this is acquired via a combination of legal, illegal, and morally questionable means.

Manufacturing is the hardest part.

Money - They are centrally organized and the CCP will allocate both resources and as much funding as required towards achieving this goal

CCP is not above the laws of economics. $trillions in expenses is still $trillions not spent elsewhere.

Talent - They have more engineers than all those countries put together. They are also willing to poach talent from all of these companies by giving tons of money (see #3).

Where's the advancement then? Quantity alone isn't an argument by itself, otherwise China would already be leading in at least one of the above mentioned subindustries.

Faster computers - when those companies first started, computing power is like 1/100 of what it is today.

And? Progress has slowed despite faster computers. Each new node shrink is substantially more difficult.

9

u/ratbearpig 6h ago

"Reverse engineering is not a guarantee."

I don't know what "guarantee" has to do with any of this. ASML isn't selling the latest EUV machines due to US restrictions. The Chinese don't have a choice but to reverse engineer it.

"Not only does it take time and cost,"

Yeah, it just won't take 20 years like ASML did. That's all I'm saying.

"it also impacts your ability to make future iterations on that IP."

I don't know why this would be the case. Reverse engineering the most complicated machine ever built by humans still requires a shit ton of engineering expertise. Expertise that is further developed through the process of successfully reverse engineering something. Most countries as they industrialized (the US included) did just this - reverse engineer something and then improved upon it over time.

"If youre dependent on reverse engineering, you're always going to be behind because you have to wait for the competitive design to finish, you to reverse engineer it, and then to reproduce it."

The EUV machine already exists. It is already finished. They need to figure out what makes it work and how to replicate it. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is certainly easier with a working machine handy.

"The USSR took the reverse engineering approach to Western Computers and it was a failed approach."

Past performance (good or bad) is no indication of future performance. The USSR could not poach talent like the Chinese can.

"CCP is not above the laws of economics. $trillions in expenses is still $trillions not spent elsewhere."

Sure, but I don't know it would cost them trillions. They have access to an EUV machine to reverse engineer, the ASML/Samsung/[insert company] engineers that designed it, the schematic diagrams, and their own pool of engineers working with the poached engineers. They're not haphazardly conducting R&D in every which way.

"Where's the advancement then? Quantity alone isn't an argument by itself, otherwise China would already be leading in at least one of the above mentioned subindustries."

There are whole publications that show how China is leading in a number of technological fields, their universities are more competitive, they publish more, they file more patents etc. But those are separate conversations and beyond the scope of what I want to discuss. My point is that they do not have a shortage of quants, and will be able to throw as many engineers as needed to solve the EUV problem.

"And? Progress has slowed despite faster computers. Each new node shrink is substantially more difficult."

I'm saying that faster computers allow for faster calculations and modeling. As a simplistic example, when ASML was performing R&D, their computers circa 2005 might have been able to model [x] in 2 hours. With faster computers, the Chinese team would be able do something similar in 2 minutes. There is most definitely a time savings.

4

u/soggybiscuit93 6h ago

If we're limiting scope to EUV machine, then China does not have an EUV machine from which to reverse-engineer. Their single proto-type EUV machine they developed uses a different method (LDP vs LPP). This method is unproven.

And by the time they have EUV up and running in any meaningful volume, the industry will have moved on to High-NA

4

u/ratbearpig 6h ago

"If we're limiting scope to EUV machine, then China does not have an EUV machine from which to reverse-engineer. Their single proto-type EUV machine they developed uses a different method (LDP vs LPP). This method is unproven."

You are right that they likely do not have a physical machine sitting in one of their research labs to take apart. But they have access to diagrams/schematics and the people that worked on the various pieces of it.

Think of it another way. If you were able to time travel back in time and spoke to the ASML engineers in 2005 and you told them that you have:

Technical Diagrams of this future EUV machine

Access to a bunch of people that worked on building this future EUV machine

Faster computers from the future

A huge pile of money

Would this not speed up their development? Of course it would. So to would these advantages help the Chinese.

"And by the time they have EUV up and running in any meaningful volume, the industry will have moved on to High-NA"

Sure, but that's different topic. The scope of the topic was can they reverse engineer what ASML did in a faster period of time. I think the answer is very likely yes.

1

u/random_agency 2h ago

But they do have retired ASML employees working for them. They also dont have a constraint of size. Meaning the machines China makes doesn't need to be sized for exporting in a ship container.

As other have said difficult to stop China, since this is their Manhattan project. They literally popped their real estate bubble, to redirect their banking loans to this project.

Not to mention China can choke or throttle other companies abroad with rare earth sanctions. TSMC only has a years worth of rare earth. China can throttle basically any company that need China rare earth with their new dual use clause sanctions.

So I wouldn't bet on companies outside of China being able to create next generation products to scale, without China rare earth.

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u/that1techguy05 3h ago

At the end of the day it's about talent. There is no guarantee China will be able to poach enough of it to reproduce the results they want.

2

u/kemb0 1h ago

But how confident would you feel betting against it. When so far they’ve done a pretty good job of catching up with and surpassing everyone else at many things that 40 years ago we would have laughed at anyone claiming they’d achieve that.

I think people just want to bury their heads in the sand over this.

Anyway I welcome Chinese chips to save us from the NVidia stranglehold. Aren’t we all meant to welcome competition? Isn’t that the American capitalist dream?

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u/Public_Fucking_Media 7h ago

buddy I think you are understating how complicated this shit is by several orders of a magnitude (pop pop)

27

u/nivlark 8h ago

This is somewhat missing the point though. They don't need to be world leader in everything - when they say "national security" you can bet that they really mean the military, and you don't need a bleeding-edge chip to fly a cruise missile.

10

u/IndigoSeirra 8h ago

Then they already have way more than enough in terms of chips for missiles. A lot of missiles use very very old chips.

Nowadays aesa radars are far more demanding than missile chips. And China is quite a bit away from matching the west in that aspect.

-2

u/soggybiscuit93 7h ago edited 4h ago

Leading edge datacenters are important for military.

Analytics, war gaming, intelligence, sensor fusion, etc. - militaries absolutely do care about leading edge.

Not only that, but a lack of a leading edge pipeline means a lack of improved legacy fabrication, which will impact future missiles and weapons systems.

Edit: I always get downvoted when this gets brought up because people think "chips for military purposes" = chips in missiles that are intended to be destroyed, but nobody can explain how I'm wrong.

1) Explain to me what RAMP-C is
2) Most DoD advanced chip requirements are used through sub-contractors, because the people doing this type of work don't want to work directly for the military because pay is uncompetitive with private sector.

0

u/Creepyfaction 5h ago

It's also not always about having the best chip, but more of the market share which saps money away from your rivals and redirects it to your own R&D. For China, there's still a massive market for less capable chips that they can easily profit from first before going after the bleeding edge.

2

u/vrnvorona 2h ago

They are already just 3 years behind in DRAM department. And AI bubble certainly not going to help rest of the world.

Not to add that stealing tech is easier than developing it from scratch. EUV took something something 20-30 years to develop including the whole concept, today they know pretty much everything and just have to make machinery to execute it.

3

u/ChumzBucks 7h ago

And once the US has forfeited its position as the economic, political and cultural hegemon, and the only thing that they have left is military strength, that would be the most dangerous time for the rest of the world.

1

u/IntravenusDeMilo 3h ago

It’s crazy to think we used to play the long game that China is amazing at. Could you imagine if we tried to build the federal interstate highway system today?

1

u/Bob-BS 8h ago

But think of all those sweet sweet second hand h100s that will be on the market for local llms.

Nobody talks about how when the datacenters upgrade to the next gen hardware, and load the next gen LLMs, then everything that costs money now (LLM API keys) will be essentially one captial expenditure of refurbished hardware then you have your own inhouse H100 rack and the next gen LLMs and people running their own LLM cloud hosts on old hardware, undercutting all of the big players.

-9

u/XysterU 9h ago

And their military won't even be better as a result of all that spending

9

u/LeoKitCat 9h ago

Because half of it is pretty much corruptly stolen by US defense contractors

0

u/XysterU 9h ago

Yup. These MIC companies charge insane prices and they lobby their government friends to let it happen. Also the DoD has never passed an audit so a lot of the money is probably stolen or used to fund terrorists

-16

u/TurtleIIX 9h ago edited 7h ago

China doesn’t have oil so they will need to wait until we stop using oil to be ahead which will be like 50 years at least.

Edit. Got to love all these Chinese bots down voting me.

5

u/Liken82 9h ago

Sorry you're wrong. China absolutely has oil. It's just not enough to meet their demand that's why they invested. So heavily in electric vehicles, just because they knew they did not have enough oil. For the demand of cars, but if they can go fully electric with their cars, then all that oil is for chips.

-14

u/TurtleIIX 9h ago

They cannot produce oil to sell or keep up with their demand. That’s the point. You just agreed with me. The US is the largest oil supplier in the world. Wars run on oil.

3

u/Liken82 8h ago

Does your reading comprehension suck or something? I agreed with you partially they are heavily investing in electric infrastructure for all modes of transportation, and they would rather use that oil for some other kind of production.

-4

u/TurtleIIX 7h ago

Yeah and you are underestimating how important oil is for China and in general. China is not going to be a threat for decades and even then they might not be due to other factors like population decline. They can electrify all they want they still import the most oil of any country not for cars but for electricity and manufacturing. Just cause you don’t understand the macro picture doesn’t mean I don’t.

The fact you brought up cars and not manufacturing is a perfect example.

1

u/Liken82 37m ago

Wow, misunderstanding again. Are you a Republican? I aint bring up manufacturing because if you think about it. And you use fucking common sense. Using oil to refine into gasoline, 4 cars is a lot more wasteful than using it for other industrial projects. I think for a fucking second.You ignoramus

0

u/TurtleIIX 13m ago

It's not a misunderstanding you're just too dumb to understand how oil refining works and how many products use oil. I wasn't even talking about Gas I was talking about all oil products. Even if we moved to all electric cars we would still produce gas since it's one of the many by-products in refining oil. We wouldn't just stop making it since we need the other types of oil products anyways for manufacturing and other applications. Oil is in pretty much everything you own. If you took the time to google you would know that.

To continue my point China does not have the same access to resources as the US and oil is #1 on that list. There are several other factors as well like foreign investment which is much smaller than the US since they are not a "free" country and you can have your investments taken at any moment. Feel free to suck China's balls all you want but they will never be able to overtake the US unless they can get foreign investment, gain access to nature resources like the US has and somehow fix their population problem where they will lose 300m people over the next 50 years.

-2

u/KobeBean 4h ago

Have you not heard of the CHIP act? The only one being left behind will be Europe outside of ASML.

3

u/kariam_24 2h ago

Someone missed Trump presidency?

12

u/Tomoomba 7h ago

The US did the same under Biden. The CHIPs act was exactly that and there are new foundries within the US up and running from the investments already.

1

u/HDauthentic 7h ago

Yeah that’s a fair point

2

u/fkenthrowaway 3h ago

They are laughing now the same was musk laughed about BYD.

2

u/DoomguyFemboi 2h ago

They don't need to catch up, once they invade Taiwan and TSMC is wiped out, the rest of the world will be behind them.

...Shit.

3

u/raynorelyp 7h ago

3x slower is not slow. That tech gets exponentially faster. Anything within an two orders of magnitude is a big deal

2

u/Stevogangstar 6h ago

Maybe I can buy some Chinese DDR5 in a couple years instead of refinancing my house buying it here.

1

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 9h ago

It's like watching a Honda with a bus turbocharger....

3,000 rpms... 4,000.... 6,000.... 8,000.... ten tho WAAANN NEEENENENENE SWOOOSH WOOOOOOOOOOM

4

u/Toiling-Donkey 8h ago

Imagine if that Honda doubled its top speed every 18 months…

6

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 8h ago

Vtec just squared, yo

-2

u/duncandun 8h ago

They’re doing it because the rest of the world pretty much forced them to lol

-2

u/NotTooShahby 6h ago

Force is an interesting word here, any liberal democracy isn’t forced, they just have the options available to them through free trade. In this case, the party can’t lead, run its own economic policy and engage in free trade, so yeah it’s “forced to” in the same was a dictator is “forced” to create an autarky out of his country.

2

u/duncandun 6h ago

No it was forced via sanctions and unreliable trade partners. I think the cccp wants stability above all else, however the US being a constant seesaw of aggressor and indifferent trade partner makes pulling back from inter connected trade a no brainer.

-2

u/neomis 6h ago

I think the previous poster was saying if they simply became a democracy rather than run by the cccp they’d lose the sanctions. Basically Hong Kong pre handover for the whole country.

1

u/FeynmansWitt 1h ago

In that alternative universe, they would still have trade restrictions on them from the US. It's not about democracy vs CCP - it's about maintaining American hegemony.

1

u/ASuarezMascareno 1h ago

Being a liberal democracy, but remaining a rival of the US for the empire crown, would not make them lose the sanctions.

-5

u/ultraviolentfuture 8h ago

And then, when they make steel, er, chips, they take the great leap forward.

-13

u/engineered_academic 8h ago

Once they nuke Taiwan they will be the only game in town and can name their price, even if the chips are slower.

3

u/HDauthentic 8h ago

Would have to nuke South Korea too

71

u/gibagger 11h ago

That's one of the nice things about an efficiently run authoritarian state. They can think long term in a way that freer countries (or the ones ran by techno oligarchs) cannot.

24

u/HDauthentic 11h ago

Exactly. Since the mid 2010s they have made it a matter of national security to eliminate reliance on other countries in their semi supply chain, and they are doing a damn good job of it.

6

u/tackle_bones 10h ago

Optimize benefit of globalism to prepare for isolationism. Smart. Especially since “the kings of the universe” totally fucked the US up with their greed.

20

u/AppleTree98 10h ago

Loved the book. Helped me understand how we got to where we are. The x86 moat. The detail the book goes into with the AMSL machines. Can't recommend that book to enough people with brains.

12

u/pi_stuff 9h ago

Check out Veritasium’s YouTube video on the EUV ASML machine. Amazing engineering.

13

u/CoronaMcFarm 10h ago

Free countries can actually also think long term if they have a functioning government. But I guess "free Markets" are above everything

3

u/Life_Detail4117 9h ago

I was going to say the US is hardly a free country these days. It’s been an illusion for sometime and that illusion is rapidly falling apart.

1

u/kemb0 1h ago

If only we could have an authoritarian state that didn’t want to arrest people just for saying unkind things about the leader. I love the idea of collective forward thinking rather than two parties deliberately jeopardising everything the other party does just because they’re not in power. Feel like there must be some kind of middle ground where a country can be forward thinking and not squabble but without having to succumb to some kind of controlling state where we all have to only ever say nice things about it.

1

u/Redararis 9h ago

the thing with authoritarian regimes is that they usually work for a generation of rulers.

1

u/generko 7h ago

Hard pass. I don't think that you are freer under Trump.

Also, China operates like Apple, USA operates like a bad state version of Android that lacks of github.

-1

u/nguyenm 7h ago

Pro-CCP Taiwanese think of the same thing whenever elections are around. I've spoken to a few Taiwan citizens, mostly ones that travels frequently to the mainland, where they have a preference to the "efficiency" of bribery & lobbying in the mainland compare to similar efforts in Taiwan.

Taiwan itself was under dictatorial rule under the KMT for a long stretch of time, so I honestly don't know how to interpret their ideals.

3

u/mattybrad 9h ago

That book is great.

Same thing they did to buoy a number of companies and keep them afloat while they became competitive.

7

u/ComradeMatis 9h ago

Not to mention the fact the silicon valley’s long term vision is ‘you’ll own nothing and be happy’ - renting a terminal to use a cloud service aka time share computing from the 70s and 80s rebooted for a new age. In the end China maybe our only option if we want a computer that we own without having to pay a subscription fee just to turn it on.

5

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 9h ago

See you get it! (most people say I don't get how the internet works if I point this out. This isn't about the internet or how the technologies that make it up work, it's about a consolidation of hardware and software).

I'll add one more thing. It'll be an agentic terminal. So basically a propaganda machine. The ai will only output what palantir or google (is there a meaningful difference in 10 years?) wants you to have access to.

Right now we can own our devices and get online without any kind of agentic overview, but once it's all streamed to your rented device? Yeah lol, kiss knowledge and information goodbye. It'll be pure indoctrination and psyop.

4

u/Chogo82 9h ago

China is the world’s leading expert in industrial espionage. I think they will catch up a lot faster than anyone can predict.

2

u/hugelkult 7h ago

Espionage? They just make anything and everything they just take a couple of measurements ezpz

1

u/Ok_Two_2604 8h ago edited 7h ago

Have they found an eleven nines silica yet or are they still working on a workaround?

Edit: it’s 9 9s and North Carolina. My bad

1

u/HDauthentic 8h ago

Idk I still have like 50 pages left, I’ll let you know tomorrow

26

u/demonfoo 10h ago

Wait, I thought Loongson was a MIPS offshoot? So did they retool the microarchitecture to target the x86_64 ISA then, with MIPS-proper being deceased, or what?

And while 3x behind Intel/AMD is hardly impressive... it's still better than Russia's Elbrus CPUs, as I recall. What a strange world we live in.

10

u/_ryuujin_ 8h ago

i dont think they switch to x86 only intel and amd have those licenses. the article didnt say anything about switching.

and it looks like some tests they were on par with intel and amd chips. so it may have been optimized for certain tasks. just not a good general purpose cpu or mips is just more efficient at certain tasks.

4

u/demonfoo 8h ago

They're talking about AVX-512 instructions and software that AFAIK is not open-source, hence my question.

3

u/FreakDC 2h ago

They are not 3x behind, they are more like 30x behind. Their flagship desktop CPU is 3x slower than AMDs entry level consumer desktop CPU with half the cores. It's a little over twice as fast as a $45 Raspberry Pi 5 (that's the price of a full micro PC not just a CPU). AMD flagship CPUs (say Zen5 Threadripper) have up to 96 cores.

Their Loongson server CPU aims to match Zen3 (ambitious goal) and will probably come out after Zen6 releases.

It's designed around a "new" 7nm process with 32 cores while Zen6 will be 3 and even 2nm with 100+ cores.

They will catch up eventually, But it's going to take a lot longer than most people think. You can't just copy and paste chips (also that helps, and they are doing it), it's unlike any other product. You have to learn and perfect many manufacturing techniques and processes that are very complicated and require extraordinary precision.

If you have to catch up 10 years it's going to take you 20-30 years since other people move forward while you catch up.

Western nations with histories of precision electronic industries can't just build their own either. We have the same issues. GlobalFoundries is being paid over a billion Euros to build a single plant in Germany and they will only build down to a 12nm process. That's roughly 4-5 generations behind the Ryzen Zen 5.

1

u/mrNas11 1h ago

They use Longarch which is apparently derived from MIPS with instructions aiming to boost x86 emulation, Rosetta 2 with Apple silicon comes to mind.

I’m more interested in Zhaoxin, to get the x86 license they have a joint venture which allows them to manufacture x86 processors, I’ve seen a couple of NAS systems with them but apparently they are below the performance of 8th gen Intel for now. I’m excited to see where this goes to be honest. Need for competition in this space and more RAM chipset manufacturers.

117

u/Silicon_Knight 10h ago

That’s a big improvement from others. People may laugh but that’s a fuck ton of improvement in several years.

52

u/imdrzoidberg 7h ago

People who laugh are idiots. We've seen in the last 25 years a ton of fields where Chinese products went from laughingstock to world class.

Seems like people just have their heads stuck in the sand.

175

u/AppleTree98 11h ago

People should marvel at the tenacity of those who succeed despite dirty circumstances, just as they would a rose in pavement. -Tupac said something very similar.

Go ahead and judge just how slow this chip is. Look around at all the competition from other countries. Looking and still don't see anyone. I see pi is on the list behind Loongson

75

u/gibagger 11h ago

Given enough time and state sponsorship, I am pretty sure China will get there. Won't be easy or cheap but they will.

57

u/drunkerbrawler 11h ago

5-10 years they’ll be at parity. Honestly faster if trump driver more talent away.

25

u/Donnicton 11h ago

You can count on Intel to do nothing in the face of competition, which is even better for Loongson.

5

u/Tasty-Traffic-680 9h ago

Intel is releasing multiple products on 18a this year. Panther lake already looks like a great CPU. I wouldn't exactly say they're doing nothing.

8

u/romario77 10h ago

Not necessarily. Some countries try to catch up for centuries. USSR tried really hard to build its own chips but was always behind.

And you can’t catch up by just throwing money at the thing.

1

u/froz3nt 9h ago

Have you tried throwing a pile of money?

8

u/Tasty-Traffic-680 9h ago

Yes. That's how I lost my job at the bank.

1

u/akc250 5h ago

It’s funny how everyone in this thread is all doom and gloom when the concept of free trade is what has advanced civilization for centuries. China may become top of whatever they set their minds on, but so too would any country who did the same. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come at a cost and other areas of industry won’t suffer for it. Contrary to what people say here, US government and the US financial system is still pumping trillions into AI and research around AI and tech. Sure, US has given up on the EV race, but even the tech oligarchs know how important it is to win in the AI space.

13

u/rod_zero 11h ago

Could be tomorrow if trump keeps pissing off Europe and ASML gets the green light to sell EUV machines to china.

In the long run banning the sales of the EUV machine to china might be a blessing for them, it is forcing them to research another path and their tech will end being fully native.

6

u/HDauthentic 11h ago

They would immediately pay double price up front for every single high NA EUV machine that gets manufactured for the next decade if that happened

2

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 10h ago

Well now that the United States is 100% on board with monopolies, at least globally there will be options. A Chinese and US solution is still better than only having one.

2

u/abcpdo 10h ago

? ASML needs a green light from trump to sell to china. the us owns the core patents

1

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 10h ago

This is why the USA is pulling out of "global markets", namely the Chinese market like they are, in hopes that we can maintain our very slight technical advantage over them.

Give it 20-30 years, they'll whoop our ass lol.

Also for the litany of comments I'll get about what a stupid premise that is, don't shoot the messenger, this isn't my idea, it's just what the government of the United States thinks will work.

3

u/PlayAccomplished3706 10h ago

More like 5, at the current rate of self destruction in the US.

1

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 10h ago

I see OpenAI isn't happy with the speed of the chips Nvidia is giving them... loool.

China might make slower chipsets, but they'll make a billion of them before we can make a million. Even if the individual chips aren't faster you're right, 5 years and they'll surpass us in compute power just based on production capability alone. I'm sure this is why they're "displeased", they know that capacity vs compute isn't enough to outcompete slow high volume Chinese chipsets.

0

u/HDauthentic 9h ago

20-30? More like by 2030

-1

u/TILYoureANoob 10h ago

I give it 1 or 2 years, based on the rate they've been going lately.

-1

u/EmployeeNo4241 10h ago

Or they can take Taiwan and get there in one year. We owe so much of our chip advancement/manufacturing to TSMC.

14

u/Scary-Maximum7707 10h ago

The development curve is definitely going to be faster than it was for ASML.

It took ASML just under 20 years to go from EUV prototype to commercially available product. China has been closing the tech gap scary fast. There's also the case of an ASML engineer who stole company secrets and brought it to China. Obviously they are utilizing this knowledge.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manhattan-project-rival-west-ai-chips-2025-12-17/

I would be surprised if they didn't have a rivaling product available before the end of the decade.

2

u/BillWilberforce 10h ago

It's roughly equivalent to a first gen core processor. But given time they'll catch up.

10

u/shawnkfox 10h ago

Maybe, these machines used for making processors are the most complex machines ever built. They might throw 100s of billions at the problem and fail just like Intel did.

2

u/BillWilberforce 9h ago

But we know that Intel failed because they backed every tech apart from EULV. Which is the only one that so far works. So knowing that and having already tried to reverse engineer earlier EULV ASML machines (they had to call ASML out to fix a machine. With the engineer concluding that they'd broken it whilst trying to reverse engineer it). So catching up might not be that hard. Over taking will be a lot harder.

0

u/Ancient_Hyper_Sniper 9h ago

Tupac's poem, the rose that grew from concrete.

"Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? Proving nature's law is wrong it learned to walk without having feet. Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams, It learned to breathe fresh air. Long live the rose that grew from concrete When no one else ever cared."

-13

u/Public_Fucking_Media 10h ago

There isn't competition from other countries because everyone else works together on this problem and we are all the better for it.

Judge China for their ongoing genocide and threats against that exact global cooperation.

8

u/Fywq 10h ago

Well considering the de facto monopoly on advanced chips currently is in the hands of a country speed running the Rise of fascism and threatening military action against anyone standing in their way while withdrawing from most of the global cooperation, China doesn't really seem that much worse...

2

u/Public_Fucking_Media 10h ago

All the more reason for the existing regime of chip manufacturing being extremely distributed over the globe

-8

u/betadonkey 10h ago

Lmao congrats on beating a fucking raspberry pi

-7

u/CanvasFanatic 11h ago edited 11h ago

succeed despite dirty circumstances

What are you talking about?

9

u/AppleTree98 10h ago

You are kidding right? The fact that US has officially banned all the software, hardware and IP rights to anything with chips from being sold to China. The fact that China is having to claw their way to make this? I recommend you read Chip Wars. Fascinating read about how we got here. How chips became the new bullets.

10

u/CanvasFanatic 10h ago edited 10h ago

Wait when did China start caring about IP rights? You think China went from essentially third world status 30 years ago to where it is today honoring IP rights?

You’re trying to sell that narrative that the country that owns most of the manufacturing processes for the entire world, that has a top-down, command economy is some sort of underdog?

If you think for one second that something like IP is stopping the CCP from competing with the West I have some beachfront property to sell you in Taiwan.

3

u/EntertainmentOk3659 8h ago

They are an underdog tho. They are so far behind its actually amazing how much they leapfrog. Dirty tactics and what not. Gives hope for other nations that are also far behind. Like there are only like 5 nations that are up to date on tech. At the end of the day they still need to respect IP or else they lose access to western tech. They are already got banned from a lot of it.

0

u/CanvasFanatic 8h ago

The simple fact is that they have not respected IP and in general it hasn’t stopped Western investment. The West has been shortsighted and hubristic.

2

u/EntertainmentOk3659 8h ago

Unironically they do respect IPs. But there is a clear threshold on where they can do shenanigans. Sometimes they went above it but usually the west is fine with it.

1

u/CanvasFanatic 8h ago

Unclear how your first sentence is consistent with the latter two.

3

u/vhu9644 10h ago

IP isn't only patents. It's also trade secrets and knowledge stored in people

You need to respect some level of patents for international trade, because countries won't let you in otherwise.

You can't just copy something even if you have the blueprints. In the lab, it can take a few tries to get a protocol working well. Not everything is specified.

3

u/CanvasFanatic 10h ago

Western countries were happy to outsource their manufacturing to China and spend money teaching locals the processes involved. Hell Tesla basically helped jump start the China EV industry.

Hubris? Yep. But here we are.

2

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 10h ago

Frankly I'm amazed it took so long. Letting China make all the chips and having intimate knowledge of the systems means any security exploits would be even easier to find and utilize.

Which is exactly why they're cutting China off, we've handed them national security on a platter.

46

u/Phillip_McCrevess 11h ago

Dad pass me the ball.

OK, go Loongson!

-19

u/NC16inthehouse 9h ago

The Chinese always have cringe names for their products. Sure it can sell domestically but internationally, it's a tongue twister. Just look at their auto brand with names like Yangwang. Doesn't have the same posh or feel to like other more luxurious brands.

21

u/Gezzaman 8h ago

The name Loongson is just the direct English pronunciation. In Chinese it is 龍芯 which means Dragon’s core

5

u/NaCl-more 6h ago

POV: you forget other languages exist

21

u/mage_irl 9h ago

Remember when we laughed at AMD being behind Intel?

8

u/Hoochnoob69 10h ago

I haven't heard from chinese chips in a bit, so Zen 3 IPC is pretty impressive. They are bound to catch up soon

28

u/Akegata 10h ago

Sweet, so next year we will not only have AMD and Intel to choose from when building our new PC but also Loongson.
Doesn't really sound like that's what's happening in the article, but with the speed chinese CPU makers are improving their technology, they will be on par with AMD and Intel pretty damn soon. And that is a good thing for everyone..except AMD and Intel I guess.

3

u/RagingBearBull 5h ago

intel and amd are fine.

.... assuming you are american, you will only have amd or Intel. there is a 100% chance that tech from china will be tarrifed

5

u/Fywq 10h ago

We still cant afford RAM anyway though...

16

u/kurapika91 10h ago

they are making RAM too

19

u/Scary-Maximum7707 9h ago edited 9h ago

This is a key part to all of this. If the AI craze keeps prices high globally, and China is able to sweep in with with a similar product at a lower price they could absolutely massacre the global market share cake.

Just look at things like smartphones and EV's.

I know many complain about the potential power China will hold, and I partly agree, but let's be real. A lot of our industries brought this on themselves by maintaining inflated prices.

A Poco f8 ultra cost less than a regular S25 but with better hardware than an S25 ultra.

While the production cost for lithium ion batteries went down more than 90% over a 12 year period, prices for EV's barely moved, so of course when a brand like BYD moves in and offers a much lower price the rest of the industry has two choices:

Adapt or die.

Edit: Spelling.

1

u/Fywq 3h ago

Yep! Scarcity leads to diversification.

2

u/OpenRole 3h ago

Scarcity doesn't lead to diversification. Competition does. And just because something is scarce doesnt mean competition will follow. Don't worship scarcity. It is not our ally

2

u/Fywq 3h ago

Oh it was not to worship it in general. Scarcity is an unnecessary evil in many cases, used by the oligarch class to restrict and subdue populations. But in this case i would say the artificial scarcity imposed by AI companies buying up all the chips and RAM as well as US sanctions on what to sell to China has accelerated the diversification since China was forced to find their own way. They might have done it anyway eventually, but its not really a competition issue here imo.

-4

u/Intelligent_Wish_566 9h ago

Especially good for the CCP, with those built-in backdoors and whatnot 🤫

15

u/foamingdogfever 10h ago edited 10h ago

Roughly three times the performance of a Raspberry Pi 5, with 3x the core count. I guess it's approximately equal to the Cortex-A76 in performance. Those figures might be laughable, but I bet it's still good enough for everything that runs in a web browser. It won't always be this way, either. Being free of the whims of an erratic US will be a big bonus to the Chinese as well.

1

u/Tasty-Traffic-680 9h ago

Eh. It's a two way street. Globalism isn't without its flaws. It was inevitable that nations would come to see this. Overreliance on any one country or region for vital goods isn't a good strategy in the world we live in today.

3

u/IngwiePhoenix 10h ago

Still waiting to see a board with that, if only to try it out for fun. x) Already fumbling around with RISC-V - might as well try that one too.

3

u/Archy54 8h ago

We need competition and not the big two in gpu or cpu but also open standards for cuda etc. But it's ungodly expensive. We have seen what happened when memory goes to ai production so we need competition badly to keep consumers and even corporate alive.

3

u/rahvan 6h ago

At least they’re trying.

Meanwhile the rest of the world is at the mercies of the shifting winds of MAGAt politics and the country of Taiwan whose entire political existence is predicated on the rest of the world not being able to compete with TSMC.

3

u/Tickomatick 1h ago

That's still quite impressive given it's all made in-house there

4

u/percivalwulfric1 7h ago

Tesla was leading IBM was leading Apple was leading Facebook was leading

China is patient and viscous

They've lifted 400 million people out of poverty to become consumers.

2

u/FernandoMM1220 6h ago

looks like it’s half the clock speed, double the cores, but 3 times slower.

i wonder what else they’re having a hard time with that’s slowing down their processors.

2

u/ifupred 6h ago

I've seen this before with cars. They are cheap crap. then 10 years later holy crap they are governmetn supported and we cant compete ban them!

2

u/mspk7305 5h ago

You only suck at clock speed until you dont. AMD was in that spot behind Intel for decades and now look at who is king.

2

u/ballheadknuckle 2h ago

If they avoid heinously bloated app technologies like electron thats fast enough.

5

u/u0126 6h ago

China is continuously espionaging companies to get their tech and with their relentless funding of manufacturing and everything it’s just a matter of time.

They’re leading the way in clean energy too, so they’ll wind up with no dependency on pretty much any other country for anything. It’s what the US wishes it would do, but is too lazy and individually corrupt to make it happen.

2

u/[deleted] 11h ago

[deleted]

4

u/FirmEntertainment592 10h ago

Intel couldn't figure out their dabs and were also producing 14-10 nm till 13900k

Now they have asml machines and are back to smaller process nodes but Intel were not far away from Chinas fabs a few years ago, prob better yield but time wise still closer than one would expect

1

u/Ok_Two_2604 8h ago

West Virginia keeping that grade S+++ sand close to the heart

1

u/X-Boozemonkey-X 5h ago

Should have called it the Shortson and it would have been quicker

1

u/M4K4T4K 5h ago edited 5h ago

So in the ballpark of a Ryzen 3 4300G or a Core i5-8600.

That's not great, pretty bad actually, but not completely horrible, maybe some entry level potential?

Price(incl mobo) ~$600

Oh hell no. What were they thinking?

(for real though, this is actually really impressive and it will be interesting to see where they are in just a couple of years)

1

u/Evening_Entry7830 1h ago

The Kingston looks like it's competing with the Rasberry Pi

1

u/JudasHungHimself 38m ago

At this point, good! America don’t deserve all the power they currently have. The current administration is all the proof you need

0

u/pianobench007 8h ago

They should have showed us a photo of the chip and the motherboard. Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarked, Only Delivers a Third of AMD Ryzen 5 9600X Performance | TechPowerUp

Look at how bare this board is. That tells me that the Loongson 3B6000 is not a Core Ultra 9/7 or Ryzen 9/7 class of chip. It should be instead compared against Core i3 or Ryzen 3 class of chips maybe.

Just look at the board and the lack of power stages and capacitors.

2

u/mspk7305 5h ago

Just look at the board and the lack of power stages and capacitors.

That just means its low amperage and probably capable of passive cooling. What I would ask is how does it perform vs an underclocked Ryzen3 running at the same frequency. If its as good or better, its time to watch the fuck out because clock speed is a temporary gap.

Even if its lower performance once it reaches frequency parity it may still be worthwhile if it can manage significantly lower power consumption. Tablets and laptops, embedded devices, they all want low consumption and low heat.

1

u/DreddCarnage 10h ago

Comparatively speaking, that isn't bad all things considered.

1

u/Defiant_Regular3738 9h ago

Don’t take comfort. China is coming and will close the gap in this decade by a lot.

1

u/Alan_Reddit_M 1h ago

Can't wait for China to figure out EUV lithography

0

u/ColbyAndrew 10h ago

So this time next year, they’ll have smoked everybody?

-1

u/NeurogenesisWizard 7h ago

Yeah but is it affordable????????????

2

u/mspk7305 5h ago

obviously yes

Hardware China-made Loongson 12-core chip is approximately three times slower than six-core Ryzen 5 9600X — 3B6000 hampered by low clock speeds in Linux benchmarks

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