Re-inventing the wheel, Chinese government has a lot of money to burn, they should learn that the west has many dead ISA architectures that have caved in over the years. Why not take RISC-V and throw in billions? China should know they are the below the West in tech (like forever) and PRIMARILY focus on making your own citizens life better by giving them the best in basic human needs.

The instruction set seems to have emulation support, which raises the question whether these are native benchmarks or running MIPS or AMD-64 code.

Still, brave move to release a new ISA these days. It's all about software support, and even with all its backing and a lot of years development RISC-V still seems patchy.

Edit: Interesting to see Hypertransport support in there.

DanceswithUnix
The instruction set seems to have emulation support, which raises the question whether these are native benchmarks or running MIPS or AMD-64 code.

Still, brave move to release a new ISA these days. It's all about software support, and even with all its backing and a lot of years development RISC-V still seems patchy.

Edit: Interesting to see Hypertransport support in there.

With China having the population size it does, there's likely enough there to build their own internal market and the advantage of avoiding external government spying / backdoors (and placing their own) likely has appeal. Combine that with what has happened to Huawei for being too dependent on Western IP and I can see their own developers creating (likely with CCP encouragement) their own software to be self sufficient and avoid dependency.

I miss ISA slots.

philehidiot
With China having the population size it does, there's likely enough there to build their own internal market and the advantage of avoiding external government spying / backdoors (and placing their own) likely has appeal. Combine that with what has happened to Huawei for being too dependent on Western IP and I can see their own developers creating (likely with CCP encouragement) their own software to be self sufficient and avoid dependency.

I miss ISA slots.

They can have all of that with RISC-V. Completely open source.

Apart from ISA slots :)

RISC-V might be patchy but why pretend you can do things alone? The reason why USA is a super power is because their tech and products are everywhere. If the primary goal of China is to conquer the planet with its ‘unique’ products they are way too late. Unless they come up with a futuristic StarTrek level tech (unicorn).

I wouldn't dismiss China as a force in high tech just yet. I'm old enough to remember the west slagging off Japanese manufacturing as late as the 1960's, and doing the same with Taiwanese technology in the 1990's.
You see, these nations value education of their citizens. The west…not so much. A lot of the youth in the west are too busy scoring/dealing drugs etc as a way to get rich quick. Education is too hard work for many of them.

The east is ahead on Technology, alone JP is far ahead as a country of whole compared the the rest of the world tech wise.

IF the USA is so amazing, why is it that all the actual good stuff is made in the far east, a brand like Samsung alone is huge.

Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China is not small in tech, they are if any far ahead, the factories alone for 7nm 5nm 3nm etc. Is all not on western soil to begin with… and we keep hearing of Intels SuperFinfet 10+++++++++ and the likes, though I give it all the soup on it has been cooked up well.

WAIT I said CHINA. China is the one that seems to be in the pressure to conquer the world. Just look at what has happened to Jack Ma while Jeff Bezos is building rockets.

DanceswithUnix
They can have all of that with RISC-V. Completely open source.

Put yourself in Chinese shoes, imagine RISC-V products become mainstream and are used wide-spread in society.

You would have to be an extremely naive person to think the USA would not manufacture RISC-V clones of existing products but with hidden payloads and try to insert them into critical areas of Chinese society. The USA spies on its own allies and bugs European governments (caught doing it more than once), imagine what they do to rivals.

So having their own instruction set does make such scenarios more difficult.

Kato-2
Put yourself in Chinese shoes, imagine RISC-V products become mainstream and are used wide-spread in society.

You would have to be an extremely naive person to think the USA would not manufacture RISC-V clones of existing products but with hidden payloads and try to insert them into critical areas of Chinese society. The USA spies on its own allies and bugs European governments (caught doing it more than once), imagine what they do to rivals.

So having their own instruction set does make such scenarios more difficult.

Erm, what??

If you are worried about clone products, well really they just have to look the part and not much else. You could build a clone machine with an ARM chip in it, and as long as it behaves to the outside world like the original you would go undetected. It would just oddly get bricked if you uploaded new firmware.

But basically the Chinese can remove all US influence by:

They take the pdf describing the RISC-V instruction set. They print it out, and read it.
They design a RISC-V compatible CPU.
They are currently writing their own compiler back ends, they can still do that.
They are doing their own OS porting onto their CPU, they can still do that.

So they lose nothing by following RISC-V design rules, because they are just an instruction set definition and in that respect cannot hide anything.

BUT, if they went RISC-V then they can run a standard Linux kernel. They can sell chips to people who want to stick with the GCC or CLANG compiler chains they love. Some people will shrug it off as a spyware riddled Chinese device, but the option is there.

I cannot imagine buying a new CPU design these days. There are already plenty to choose from and it takes years for development tools to settle down to being really usable.

There's probably some chinese gov regulation that says “all computers used in sensitive stuff must be 100% chinese IP”

Xlucine
There's probably some chinese gov regulation that says “all computers used in sensitive stuff must be 100% chinese IP”

That seems fairly sensible.

But what what it says on Wikipedia (yeah, I know) this is actually a MIPS compatible instruction set, but with additions to support faster x86 emulation etc. Which makes sense given their MIPS background, and the opening up of the MIPS instruction set.