this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Chips cold war? Doesn't sound too bad if we got to see more competition
It's the year of the Red Star OS desktop!
It's honestly surprising they ever did.
You'd figure they'd go as far as banning them for the whole country to give their own companies the market.
Gonna have to make room on my NAS for some Chinux distros.
Do they really have good enough chips? I thought this stuff was hard to do.
That probably explain why they're investing so much in RISC-V.
Are the chips easier to make?
Substantially. CISC vs RISC is night and day. Keeping x86 for so long was a mistake, but one that generated billions in value for shareholders.
Oh I love it when shareholders get their value!!
If I can ask, if we go way back like 40 or 50 years ago, why did cisc get adopted over risc?
Cisc was never adopted. It all started out basic, then they gradually added more and more shit until you had a complex CPU.
Without the concept of risc there wouldn’t be a cisc.
Additionally to the other answer: the reason CISC came up to be was "less instructions". Memory was a lot more expensive, and developers worked in assembly a lot more. So, less instructions made a lot of sense. Now, memory is cheap, and developers almost never write assembly unassisted.
But the manufacturing is still an issue.
They already have their own x86 chips. They're a few generations behind the cutting edge. They've been catching up fast which is why the US and EU have been shitting their pants trying to wage cold war. All of a sudden ramping up the China bad narrative out of left field when not long ago they were trying to work with China rather than against them..
Much of the manufacturing difficulty we hear about with western industry is achieving highest yields possible of the most powerful chips to please ravenous shareholders demanding flawless profit gains every quarter. Capitalism problems in other words. It's much different when your goal is merely to produce computers for government office use. You can still use old computers for the majority of computing needs.
New ARM chip from Loongson is supposedly competitive with Zen 3 (launched November 2020).
you dont need much to run most government level computers, and I say this knowing what lind of conputers in general some of the U.S offices were running. China already has their own build of linux for government computers, and deceloping a basic cpu for governmental office purposes wouldnt be too difficult in thr grand scheme of things.
Some of these systems were still running COBOL-coded programs and failed due to Corona overload. US asked rerired elderly devs to come and fix it because no one learnt that shit for years. That's what describes most tech in public services and governments, worldwide.