It’s amazing to me how much money Russia’s dumping into this drive for independence from Western tech (exchanging it for dependence on Chinese tech, but that’s another story), as if that’s going to be a long-term direction of the country. There’s precisely one person in Russia who actually thinks it’s a good idea, and he’s 71. Whoever succeeds Putin will inevitably have to mend those bridges, and the West will be all too happy to play along if only to prevent Russia from becoming a full-blown ally of China.
Also, Russian customers still have access to all the Intel/AMD/Nvidia tech they want; even if they’re not supplied officially, pipelines have been established for importing through neutral third countries. My personal PC has a 4090, a 5800X3D and an ATX 3.0 PSU, none of which were ever officially available in Russia since they released after Feb 2022.
Whoever comes in after Putin will probably be of the same mind and possibly be even more extreme.
Probably, but in the best case, a change of leadership might at least give them an excuse to pull out of the money sinks they have in Ukraine and restore the territories. Worst case… could be really bad.
I think most analysts and leaders actually do have what you say in mind, but no amount of expertise can provide a better answer or remove that risk so we are just managing it and doing everything slowly.
Whoever comes in after Putin will probably be of the same mind and possibly be even more extreme.
Unfortunately most “Westerners” don’t understand this at all. And I am not talking “average joe”, just look at Merkel or Steinmeier.
Some of it is of course corruption and hypocrisy, but there is strong undercurrent of ignorance of both history and nature of russian “culture” in the west.
what’s with all the quotation marks?
Better dependent on China than countries attempting to overthrow Russia.
They should probably stop attacking their neighbors. Things were just fine before that.
Attempting to overthrow Russia? Lmao. Which ones?
Hell I’m pretty sure that some of the hardware vendors are still operating in Russia to some extent, like MSI - way too many ads online from them, stores are still claiming ‘official warranty’ etc
Gigabyte certainly never stopped, and seems to have actually increased their focus there.
There’s precisely one person in Russia who actually thinks it’s a good idea, and he’s 71.
That’s not true. There is a decent minority of hyper nationalists (even more so than the average russian - who is basically genocidal if you know how to read them) who support this. They may not know what “LoongArch 64” or Linux is, but they definitely support “independence от пиндосов”.
The “it’s only putin” pitch is a ruse used by alleged russian liberals.
And then you have the vast majority who in principle might like the idea of having an iPhone, but when it comes to actions (or lack of thereof) they will always choose the path that leads to imperialism, authoritarianism and razing their neighbour’s cities to rubble.
They had a unique opportunity in the late 80s and look what kind of society they built in the last 30 years.
ha I just read an article about USA tech CEOs fawning over Zing ping or what ever hes called , seems he doesnt give a shit
Wow, Russians know how to cross compile. What dumb audience is this headline written for?
if the cpus support windows im down to try one on my own pc
you really think its going to work on Windows?
So by banning last tech to China. The US is creating a new silicon industry in China. Let’s see how it goes in two decades, because I feel like they are going to catch up and might overtake UK/US designs and Taiwanese fabs.
You “feel” like? Ok.
It will be interesting, if these cpus are used in kamikaze drones or swarm drones
Old rc aircraft like plane or helicopter don’t even have microncontroller, they stabilize only with pilot input and mechanical gyro, and can be equipped with camera and vtx for BLOS control.
Modern rc aircraft does have eletronics components for better control/smaller size, but the computing requirement is small for it to stabilize. Plane in particular is stable by design, so the computing requirement is so small that the radio receiver directly drive servo output from pilot input and electronics gyro, without the use of external control circuit. Multicopter also needs little computing to hover, but quite a bit more for aggresive maneuver (currently flight controller using stm32f4 is very popular, which has clock speed of 168MHz, much lower than commerical computer’s but is more than enough for the purpose)
Russia certainly can make their own manual suicide drone without importing any parts. Autonomous drone otoh is hard because it requires computer vision algorithm running inference to detect target, which requires edge gpu (which is nvidia only) or computer-like cpu to run real-time with usable update rate. Trade-off can be made by lower camera resolution to the extreme for faster processing speed, at the cost of not being able to capture feature that enable more sophisticate differentiation.
Their Loitering munition “lancet” uses Nvidia jetson, and they are upgrading it with target acquisition software and autonomous mode, to counter effects of Electronic hardware
I wish the chinese just used RISC V. They are using open source software anyway, why not use open hardware? I remember watching a video from CGTN about their new RISC V processor that runs Linux, with performance near i5.
But anyway, The Russians better follow GPL
China already has a bunch of RISC-V chips in the works, but that takes time. Meanwhile, their MIPS chips have been around for 15+ years at this point and have high availability.
They’re probably looking at it and trying, but it’ll take years to ramp it up to where ARM is, it’s the decades of toolchains and support and libraries around ARM and x86 that are sticky.
For anything new or interesting, they (and many others) are. But Loonsoon exists today, which is probably what Russia wants.
Most of China supersuper maker are using RISC V. For desktop, China will not intervene too much. China like competition, x86, ARM, RISC V, Loongarch.
Does this really amount to a “pivot”? It sounds like they just updated their toolchain and binaries to support LoongArch - presumably Basalt is also continuing to support other architectures too:
Russia-based Basalt SPO has been recompiled to support Chinese Loongson processors based on the LoongArch architecture
The company says the product is offered ‘as is,’ and its commercial distributives will be available later.
The distro is based on the unstable, experimental branch of the Sisyphus project repository, which developers use to test new ideas and developments, including support for various processor architectures, reports CNews. The distro is available for download, but a stable release with LoongArch support is set for Q1 2024.
It is an interesting sign that LoongArch availability in Russia is high enough that at least one company put a fair bit of work into adding support, but it seems premature to claim anyone is actually pivoting away from Intel/ARM, especially all of Russia.
Shitty headlines, welcome to the media
Seeing as how LoongArch is essentially a fork of MIPS64r6 it wouldn’t surprise me if most of the existing MIPS toolchains worked with little modification. This is a Linux ecosystem they’re using after all.
These chips are like the great-great grandchildren of the same ones you’d find in older routers.
It is ludicrous, but it makes for a topical headline so here we are.
At first I thought the goal of chip sanctions on China was to bring them to the negotiating table, negotiate out fair play and go on our way.
But if instead it keeps going the way it’s going, I wonder if 20 years from now we’re sitting in a split world, where the west has one set of ISAs, fabrication plants etc, and China has another which don’t communicate with each other, since China can’t use any new ARM extensions and eventually all of ARMv9 will be deprecated too.
I know it’s harder to get past about 5nm without EUV machines, but I wouldn’t really doubt that China putting a national effort into it could eventually get there, even if it puts them some years back for now.
Is…Is that split world even a goal? Or is that an accidental consequence of neither side getting what they want and a default path no one wanted?
SMIC say it is possible to use DUV for 2nm. Yes there will be a split standard, US or China.
Not really, translation layer/virtual machine is standard in compute these days. KVM, VMWare, Rosetta on Apple, or Kubernetes/Dockers. RISC-V is building on RISC-4 instruction sets, so compilers and all will be there. These are barriers thought up by politicos with limited tech knowledge, then get surprised by the speed of change.
Kubernetes / docker don’t do any translation at all. They’re running on the host kernel, namespaced away.
The speed of change of what exactly?