News Chinese chipmaker Loongson wins case over rights to MIPS architecture - company's new CPU architecture heavily resembles existing MIPS

[Admin]

An arbitration court ruled in Loongson's favor over whether it unlawfully used the MIPS architecture.

Chinese chipmaker Loongson wins case over rights to MIPS architecture - company's new CPU architecture heavily resembles existing MIPS : Read more

 

[jp7189]

An arbitration court ruled in Loongson's favor over whether it unlawfully used the MIPS architecture.

Chinese chipmaker Loongson wins case over rights to MIPS architecture - company's new CPU architecture heavily resembles existing MIPS :

In what court/jurisdiction was this tried? IMO, thats a very important point missing from this article.

 

[bit_user]

Thanks for sharing this. I do wonder about CIP United, BTW. What sort of company are they and where are they based?

 

[DavidLejdar]

Thanks for sharing this. I do wonder about CIP United, BTW. What sort of company are they and where are they based?

"Shanghai-based"

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN25L14N/

even comes with a graph:

 

[panda6]

In what court/jurisdiction was this tried? IMO, thats a very important point missing from this article.

Hong Kong, which despite being independent of China's processes, is effectively the same when it comes to national matters. This being part of a larger US-China tech rivalry, is unsurprising that the arbitrator dismissed all but the royalties complaint. HK is thoroughly infiltrated and it's influenced by the national interests of China.

 

[TCA_ChinChin]

"Shanghai-based"

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN25L14N/

even comes with a graph:

Thats pretty frickin complicated.

 

[COLGeek]

Thats pretty frickin complicated.

Mergers and acquisitions can be complicated, especially over time and multiple actions. This can complicate IP ownership, licensing agreements, etc.

 

[thestryker]

In what court/jurisdiction was this tried? IMO, thats a very important point missing from this article.

Hong Kong International Arbitration Center

 

[purpleduggy]

LoongArch is closer to RISCV than MIPS. They should make this move to RISCV entirely in my opinion while keeping their MIPS compatibility.

 

[COLGeek]

Stick to tech, folks. Please leave the political discourse for elsewhere. Thank you.

 

[bit_user]

LoongArch is closer to RISCV than MIPS.

Based on what?

According to Chips & Cheese:

"Loongson uses a MIPS based ISA. Prior Loongson chips were MIPS64 compatible, but the company switched over to an ISA it calls Loongarch. Loongarch shares most of MIPS’s semantics, but uses different instruction encodings. Loongson has also extended the ISA to support 256-bit vector execution."

Source: https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/29/previewing-chinas-loongson-3a5000-with-performance-counters/
​

So, they started with MIPS, then changed the binary encoding of the instructions and added some extensions. That's about as MIPS-based as you can get, without being a straight-forward extension of MIPS.

So, in what ways is it more like RISC-V than MIPS?

They should make this move to RISCV entirely in my opinion while keeping their MIPS compatibility.

Eh, it's a big country and there are indeed plenty focusing on RISC-V. Loongson dates back to before RISC-V, so it doesn't seem strange to me that they'd continue with a CPU that can efficiently emulate legacy MIPS (which prior generations of their CPUs could natively execute).

 

[jackt]

why not just use riscv ? I dont think they can make mips better than riscv.