New Chinese Laptop Appears With 14nm Loongsoon Quad-Core 3A4000 CPU (tomshardware.com) 75
"BDY electronics, a Chinese laptop manufacturer, has unveiled an all-new 13.3-inch laptop sporting Longsoon's new Dragon Core 3A4000 quad-core 14nm CPU," reports Tom's Hardware:
The biggest feature of this laptop is the CPU, featuring Longsoon's latest 14nm quad-core 3A4000 CPU. Longsoon claims the CPU is 100% faster than the previous generation 3A3000 and is comparable in performance to AMD's "Excavator" cores used in the A8-7680 Godavari architecture.
Of course, this demonstrates how far behind Longsoon is from TSMC and Intel in performance, speed, and efficiency of its latest node. However, the chairman of Loongsoon Technologies, Hu Weiwu, says, "14nm and 28nm (for its GPU node) is enough for 90% of applications.," so it appears the company isn't too worried about catching up to the performance leaders like Intel and AMD.
Due to this laptop being in the Chinese market, Windows is not supported at all. It only runs Chinese "domestic operating systems" that are typically modified versions of Linux. Fortunately, this does mean you can install any Linux flavor you want on the laptop, which can be handy if you don't want to run China-specific apps only.
Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm points out that Loongson's upcoming 3a5000 CPU "will be a 12nm CPU that is 50% faster than the 3A4000."
Of course, this demonstrates how far behind Longsoon is from TSMC and Intel in performance, speed, and efficiency of its latest node. However, the chairman of Loongsoon Technologies, Hu Weiwu, says, "14nm and 28nm (for its GPU node) is enough for 90% of applications.," so it appears the company isn't too worried about catching up to the performance leaders like Intel and AMD.
Due to this laptop being in the Chinese market, Windows is not supported at all. It only runs Chinese "domestic operating systems" that are typically modified versions of Linux. Fortunately, this does mean you can install any Linux flavor you want on the laptop, which can be handy if you don't want to run China-specific apps only.
Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm points out that Loongson's upcoming 3a5000 CPU "will be a 12nm CPU that is 50% faster than the 3A4000."
Well (Score:1)
Despite the much (mis)quoted 640 KB of memory” saying, it's indeed true that the 3A4000 is a CPU that can handle day-to-day workloads. Probably including some subtle espionage load too.
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Re: Well (Score:1)
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And the public are busy buying domestic spying devices (aka "smart speakers") like there's no tomorrow.
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No. When someone credibly threatens the US government, we just shoot them.
Easy, peasy, bloodsack squeezy.
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you should look more closely then.
First off, Xi may be a powerful head of government, but he is not a dictator. Chinese system of government is too patchwork and fragmented for there to be one true leader. This is why corruption is rampant despite the police state.
Secondly, China has been pursuing its own brand of state capitalism now for years. The chinese population is hardly classless and many of the poorer folks have upgraded to consumerist middle class types now. In fact, one of China's most pressing i
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First: Dictator For Life
Second: Upgraded from dirt poor farmer to dirt poor wage slave in a closed sweatshop system.
Third: Sure, tightly controlled capitalism. Kinda like "The House Always WIns"
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Your first mistake was using critical reasoning in a thread about China. Your second mistake was actually providing a detailed analysis of the Chinese system.
It's funny how propaganda is just something the Chinese do... dui bu dui?
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Hello, it was a communist dictatorship last time I looked.
Totalitarian it may be, communist it definitely is not
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One of China's great strengths is the ability to combine government and free-market enterprise - they can use whichever one is best for any given situation, rather than holding to a an inflexible ideology that condemns one or the other as evil.
Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be the most espionage-resistant laptop you can buy.
RMS had one if its predecessors because it could run 100% free software. If this is the same it won't need any binary blobs at all.
Also being non-x86 and non-ARM most malware won't work on it anyway.
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Maybe the chipset can upload selective RAM dumps all by itself without any "malware" installed.
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Maybe but we can check that. The old one didn't have anything like the Intel Management Engine and if one exists here it will be pretty obvious. We can even de-cap the chip to look for it.
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Maybe but we can check that. The old one didn't have anything like the Intel Management Engine and if one exists here it will be pretty obvious. We can even de-cap the chip to look for it.
It could do nothing until activated by a special ping, ie. your test machine would never wake up and start sending.
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This laptop is not for you... (Score:2)
Is not even for chinese consumers.
It is for chinese govt officials to do their average work.
That is write memos in Libreoffice writer (or the chinese equivalent), check mail in Thunderbird (or the chinese equivalent), do phone number directories in libreoffice calc (or the chinese equivalent), browse government websites for government webapps (not youtube and facebook mind you, this is a work issued laptop) using firefox (or the chinese equivalent)....
No excel heavy duty financial modeling, no gaming, no yo
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Few mistakes. The usage of e-mail in China is virtually non-existent. They have ways to literally forward e-mail to WeChat because they pretty much prefer to do everything on WeChat, even despite some of it's limitations. This is both a gift and a curse but it seems to be their culture. A few things are done via QQ which has it's own e-mail.
Also China has Starbucks and I don't think there is a Chinese equivalent. I haven't spent a lot of time in tier 1s though but in general "breakfast" culture seems very l
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This is interesting. They were founded in 2017, after I left Chongqing -- so it explains why I never saw one there. In Qinghai they have zero locations. However there are at least 3 Starbucks locations I know here. Two of these Starbucks are literally in the same shopping center. They are often very full and if you ask anyone's opinion of the chain, there is always positive remarks with regard to everything but price. It seems to me Luckin is trying to compete but ultimately their style seems more "pick-up
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My workplace still runs five-year-old laptops. We still run twelve-year-old laptops, though those are due for retirement soon. The chip is certainly inferior to AMD or Intel, but the designers are making rapid advancements, and even an inferior chip can still do a lot.
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Depends how much you care about security and running free software. RMS wasn't exactly demanding of it, from what I can tell he mostly lived in a shell and ran apps like EMACS and GCC.
It's probably a good bet if you want to increase the chances of it not having an NSA backdoor in it too. You can't completely disable the Intel Management Engine.
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Indeed. Also remember that untargeted spying is pretty much a waste of time and more expensive than what it brings in, at least when you do not do it on your own population. Would be interesting to see what this thing cost. May well be or grow into being a valid, cost-effective alternative for many things.
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I know you are the same person as hairyfeet and war4peace.
I'm gonna find all your sockpuppets, and then you. Have fun while you still can.
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I know you are the same person as hairyfeet and war4peace.
I'm gonna find all your sockpuppets, and then you. Have fun while you still can.
Funny, how you know things that are untrue. There seems to be something broken in your mind.
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I'm really interested to see the cost too, but it might be quite high. Products designed only for the domestic market, and especially those designed for government use, tend to be really pricey when you can find someone willing to export them.
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It's MIPS based but supposedly has support for emulating x86 with 'LoongBT' instructions that, say, speed up Qemu.
Whether that makes it more competitive running Windows binaries than Hangover on a raspberry pi 4 or Talos II, dunno, benchmarks?
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They are trying to get away from Windows too, preferring various home grown Linux distros.
It will probably be similar to Mac OS on ARM. Mostly native code, anything that offloads to a GPU will be okay, everything else... Well at least it runs.
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Tge FBI just found one of these (Score:2)
with Hunter Biden's data on it.
MIPS64 (Score:3)
The Loongsoon 3A4000 is a MIPS64/R5 chip, so it's no wonder that it doesn't run MS-Windows.
It does have some instruction set extensions, including some that are supposed to help when emulating x86 code though. I haven't (yet) found documentation of that ISA but I would speculate that they would provide x86's exact behaviour for some instructions when running JIT-compiled code. MIPS64 doesn't have 8-bit and 16-bit instructions like x86 does, for instance.
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If it runs Linux, bochs can probably be built on it. I ran bochs once on a Mac SE/30 running NetBSD.
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Yes it did.
https://support.apple.com/kb/S... [apple.com]
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NT4 used to run on MIPS...
It won't have native drivers for the hardware, but you may be able to virtualize it with qemu/kvm.
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Which begs the question, if going MIPS, why not just adopt RISC-V?
Perhaps because the loongsong project was started in the eraly 00's, when RISC-V did not exist.
There are not only laptops, but also supercomputers using these processors, with code for them tried and tested, and those Supers will need expansion/renewal, hence the need to keep developing the architecture ...
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Progress is progress (Score:1)
Of course, this demonstrates how far behind Longsoon is from TSMC and Intel in performance, speed, and efficiency of its latest node.
Dudes at Tom's evidently still don't get it. Slept through HIST 101.
However, the chairman of Loongsoon Technologies, Hu Weiwu, says, "14nm and 28nm (for its GPU node) is enough for 90% of applications.,"
Dude gets it. This could be trouble, better give him more time staring at the XP meadow.
Due to this laptop being in the Chinese market, Windows is not supported at all. It only runs Chinese "domestic operating systems" that are typically modified versions of Linux. Fortunately, this does mean you can install any Linux flavor you want on the laptop, which can be handy if you don't want to run China-specific apps only.
But what about my thousands of game libs and drivers? At least I have Windows calculator but it's output is ideograms. Funny, it wasn't doing that yesterday...
Re: Progress is progress (Score:2)
Good enough on the desktop, sure. But a larger feature size means higher power consumption. Users expect a laptop to last six to eight hours these days, not one or two.
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Good enough on the desktop, sure. But a larger feature size means higher power consumption. Users expect a laptop to last six to eight hours these days, not one or two.
Depends on the user, depends on the laptop.
A lot of business users use laptops tethered to a desk most of the time rather than desktops. And you can lug it to meetings or even home without closing everything down. A couple of hours battery life means you don't have to go into a meeting fully charged or carry a charger in.
Heck, I'm at a compan
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I'm not talking about that kind of life while compiling, just while browsing and doing word processing, that sort of thing. My cheapass $300 HP laptop can manage it. But it's a Ryzen 3.
The problem with this laptop is going to be IDLE power consumption will be through the roof by modern standards.
Sure, lots of people will be OK with that. But it's still pathetically behind.
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Sure, lots of people will be OK with that. But it's still pathetically behind.
Yeah it's behind and a fair way for sure. But if it's practical for a lot of cases (it is), then they can sell a lot and that's going to help a great deal with the next generation. I suspect that is the long term plan.
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I don't and over the lifetime of a computer, most batteries that initially state six to eight hours means they will be one or two hours in a year. I have an Asus RoG laptop I have used for like four years now which has an initial lifetime listed as you said but is now down to around an hour battery which is after also replacing the battery once. The convenience of the laptop, is I can carry it to my office, the classroom, and my home but all these locations have power outlets -- so it is extremely rare to a
14nm - so as far behind as Intel? (Score:2)
Re:14nm - so as far behind as Intel? (Score:5, Informative)
The summary says, and this is apparently the manufacturers own admission, that this 14nm darling of a quad core CPU is about equal to a 28nm quad core CPUs manufactured by AMD based on the steamroller design. Steamroller cores are of course known to perform worse than the previous iterations phenom IIs cores, both core for core and clock for clock, which were themselves 45nm.
Pay attention. The summary says, to the informed, that these perform worse than the 45nm designs from 10 years ago from AMD.
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No. The 28nm is for the GPU that is being used. The 14nm is for the CPU. And it should also be noted that the speeds are increasing pretty quickly, and by next year, the next CPU will be 50% faster.
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Performance isn't the main design goal here, independence and security are.
They licensed the MIPS instruction set but the architecture and design are totally home grown. China can trust this CPU.
It's part of their technological independence strategy. They have x86 too but don't want to have all their eggs in one basket.
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Bingo. That independence is a multi-factor response to. There are many reasons they want to make this move and their slow growth towards equivalent processing speeds is not their primary focus with respect to their present development.
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Pay attention.
But pay attention to the long term...
The summary says, and this is apparently the manufacturers own admission, that this 14nm darling of a quad core CPU is about equal to a 28nm quad core CPUs manufactured by AMD based on the steamroller design. Steamroller cores are of course known to perform worse than the previous iterations phenom IIs cores, both core for core and clock for clock, which were themselves 45nm.
The earthmover cores always seemed to fare better on Phoronix where they weren't su
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Huawei has the Kunpeng 920 running UOS which seems a better choice, if all you care about is technology independence.
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Huawei has the Kunpeng 920 running UOS which seems a better choice, if all you care about is technology independence.
Isn't this end to end, with the fabrication also being done in the PRC? The Kunpeng is on TMSC. Isn't the architecture one of the standardish ARM ones? I think with the Loongsoon everything except the instruction encoding is custom. From a practical point of view, the Kungpeng looks better, though at 195W TDP, you'd probably want a cut down model for a laptop :)
Also I wasn't aware of Kunpeng,
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I think 195W TDP is for the 64c server variant? I would be surprised if the entire Kunpeng 920 8c board used that much power (unless they're counting the GPU).
Yes, Kunpeng 920 is on TSMC's 7nm node, and it uses a custom ARM core designed by Huawei's HiSilicon division (known as Taishan v110). It isn't extensively benchmarked, but if I recall correctly, its Blender results put it somewhere north of A72 - nothing that great.
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Yes, Kunpeng 920 is on TSMC's 7nm node, and it uses a custom ARM core designed by Huawei's HiSilicon division (known as Taishan v110). It isn't extensively benchmarked, but if I recall correctly, its Blender results put it somewhere north of A72 - nothing that great.
Interesting... I look forward to the phoronix benchmark anyhow.
I wonder what they're up to with the Taishan core. The Kirin 990 is a stock A76 core, so it's odd that the custom one would be worse. That said this exceeds my knowledge, I don't kn
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Here's an article on the 8c Kunpeng 920 board if you haven't seen it already:
https://www.thefpsreview.com/2... [thefpsreview.com]
Here's a wikichip entry on Taishan v110
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/h... [wikichip.org]
Why they're going homegrown instead of licensing NeoVerse like Amazon did, I don't know. They should have been able to license NeoVerse N1 unimpeded before the Huawei embargos went into effect. In any case, 8c Kunpeng 920 took 707s to complete the Blender BMW benchmark, which is . . . not that great. I can't seem to find any
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Oh Steamroller wasn't that bad. Only problem with it was that AMD never bothered with anything more than a 2m/4t Steamroller APU. Phenom II had Thuban with 6c/6t goodness, like the 1090T.
In any case, the A8-7680 is actually a Carrizo chip based on Excavator, not Steamroller. And it was launched in 2019 for FM2+ which is really weird.
That doesn't make this new Longsoon terribly performant, though it is interesting to see that they're still trying, even with Huawei's 8c Kunpeng 920 boards out there running
Re: 14nm - so as far behind as Intel? (Score:2)
It's not indigenous. It's MIPS64 (Score:3)
They keep saying it's indigenous and not based on any foreign IP.
It's based on MIPS64 technology.
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They keep saying it's indigenous and not based on any foreign IP.
It's based on MIPS64 technology.
MIPS is fully owned by Imagination technologies, which is fully owned by Canyon Bridge Capital a chinese company, which is funded by the chinese government.
Also, they only used the MIPS64 ISA, the way the chip is implemented is completely chinese (kind of like apple only licenses the ISA and designs their own processors, without taking ARM functional blocks or chip designs).
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Nope. According to Wikipedia, its now owned by Wave Computing.
Imagination tried to revive interest in MIPS by pairing it with PowerVR but that venture went nowhere and it was on-sold, twice.
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Wave Computing has filed for Chapter 11 in April. It is reported the company is trying to sell its assets.
MIPS64 - BINFMT_IRIX anyone? (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:2)
They could have got it down to 10 nanometers if the called in Longson instead of Loongsoon.
Not Godavari (Score:2)
The A8-7680 is a weird one to be sure, but it was not a Godavari chip. Godavari was a Kaveri refresh. Godavari chips included:
https://www.cpu-world.com/Core... [cpu-world.com]
That A8-7680 is one that flew under my radar, considering it's a DDR3 chip released for the old Bolton/FM2+ platform in 2019. It's a Carrizo, in any case. By January 2019, Bristol Ridge and Raven Ridge had long since replaced Carrizo. If you were still using Carrizo on FM2+ in 2019, you weren't going to have a very good time of it, and I wouldn't