Chinese domestic PC-computing ecosystem

I've seen more and more news of China shifting its PC ecosystem (CPU, GPU, OS) away from western sources, something like 100% adoption of domestic pc by the government by 2022, so I would like to pose some of my questions to the forummers here

Currently, I only know of 2 moderately successful CPU companies, Zhaoxin and Loongson. Afaik Zhaoxin has a kind of special x86 license (not sure how reliable it is) while Loongson uses its own instruction set. There's also a few others but I rarely hear about them. Does anybody know which type will most likely be adopted by the chinese government?

And also the OS, I heard UOS was supposed to be the new OS but it doesn't seem to be getting much development compared to things like Deepin, Kylin v10. How are they going to match the OS with all the different instruction set CPUs?

Also, how does Huawei fit into all this? Are there any plans to standardise on new productivity suites away from MS office or Adobe?

sndef888 said:

Also, how does Huawei fit into all this? Are there any plans to standardise on new productivity suites away from MS office or Adobe?

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There is always LibreOffice

China doesn't need LibreOffice because it has Kingsoft which makes WPS office.

X86 is going the way of the dodo bird and it's mostly used for Legacy code and software as both Microsoft and Apple are trying to transition away from it (mostly due to power inefficiencies and the rise of smartphones).

While Huawei still uses ARM (because it outright owns the license) for Harmony OS and it's not the case for other companies. That's why I've been hearing other Chinese companies are interested in adopted RISC-V (the open-source version of ARM for instructional sets which I've heard isn't too hard to recode to ARM). Both ARM and RISC-V are supported by Linux with means that UOS/Deepin should be supported.

Take what I say with a grain of salt because I'm not a computer/IT guy.

I can talk a bit about X86 licenses. Zhaoxin was founded with the help of VIA Technologies. VIA is a Taiwanese company which bought Cyrix and Centaur Technologies a couple decades back. Both those companies were USA companies which used to design their own X86 processors. Cyrix used to have a X86 license and VIA won a court case against Intel in the USA over a decade ago which granted them a license to Intel's patents. But I think that license has long expired (2016?). FWIW AMD, not Intel, owns the X86-64 patent license and they usually license it quite liberally. e.g. they granted licenses to VIA and Transmeta when X86-64 came out. Intel is a lot more stingy with licensing and it typically takes a lawsuit to even be able to get a license. Intel has licenses on things like AVX instructions which are used for multimedia like video encoding for example.

A company like Longsoon is probably not affected by Intel's patents because the CPU is MIPS based and X86 is emulated in software. Intel's patents typically cover ways to implement the instruction set in hardware. AFAIK you can't actually patent the instruction set just ways to implement it and software implementation is different enough from hardware implementation. This is similar to how Transmeta was able to emulate X86 without paying Intel for a license. Transmeta CPUs used their proprietary VLIW architecture with a X86 emulation software running on top called 'CodeMorph'.

The advantage of Longsoon is that AFAIK it is lower power and if you don't need X86 compatibility for e.g. with Linux you can run in native MIPS mode and get improved performance that way. Like you can infer from what I said above it is also less susceptible to being sued by Intel. Zhaoxin might have better X86 native performance once they get their design figured out but it still seems to be way behind the performance of AMD or Intel on the same manufacturing process right now.

In4ser said:

China doesn't need LibreOffice because it has Kingsoft which makes WPS office.

X86 is going the way of the dodo bird and it's mostly used for Legacy code and software as both Microsoft and Apple are trying to transition away from it (mostly due to power inefficiencies and the rise of smartphones).

While Huawei still uses ARM (because it outright owns the license) for Harmony OS and it's not the case for other companies. That's why I've been hearing other Chinese companies are interested in adopted RISC-V (the open-source version of ARM for instructional sets which I've heard isn't too hard to recode to ARM). Both ARM and RISC-V are supported by Linux with means that UOS/Deepin should be supported.

Take what I say with a grain of salt because I'm not a computer/IT guy.

Click to expand...

x86 is not going away but maybe shrinking from it's peak, it is still 90%+ of the desktop/server space. The M1 'awesome' benchmarks results are bias towards the M1/Mac OS as they were testing single thread performance which ARM chips are design for while x86 are designed for multi threading performance.

RISC-V, MIPS and ARM might be supported by linux, but not as many applications are compiled/verify or compatible on them yet.

Good luck when most PCs in China are still running pirated versions of win 7.

Hope China finds some way to get people to upgrade to more secure and modern OS’s.

I think the other thread gets too technical , more about supply chain side and political issues. I'm gonna start posting more consumer oriented stuff I find here.

Anyone that can speak mandarin can figure out if the guy mentions the price of one of these boxes? This is a lower end 4 core/4 thread zhaoxin setup.