Is this project still relevant with the advent of RISC-V? Can't the Chinese focus their efforts on RISC-V instead? Is there some reason Loongson is still being actively developed?
As it happens China is a big country with many independent companies in this industry. Some work on Risc-V, Loongson seems to do its own thing, though it is related.
They are putting a lot of focus on RISC-V especially Alibaba T-head design studio.
If i'm not mistaken Loongson's has instructions in it to emulate RISC-V faster.
Feels like a shotgun approach. They have x86-64 (Zhaoxin), RISC-V (Xiangshan, Alibaba), MIPS -> Loongarch (Loongson), and aarch64 (Phytium). My guess is the central government is trying to build domestic chips by throwing piles of money at anyone who says they can make one.
Result: a pile of different architectures running different instruction sets, none of which come close to being a high performance design.
