OMG this is happening !!! Loongson 3A5000 laptops finally available

[brucehoult]

They do obviously have their Elbrus SoCs too

Baikal and Elbrus-based systems are kind of "Soviet" computers not (yet) commercially available because made for Russian government agencies and government-controlled companies.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sra-centr8/icepeakitx-elbrus-8cb

Price unknown as yet, but if it's in RISC-V SBC range rather than the ridiculously priced Raptor Talos POWER9 boards then I'll probably get one for my collection.

I've run it through my primes benchmark. https://hoult.org/primes.txt

With PGO it's nearly 1.75x faster than a same-GHz Pi 4 (A72), 35% slower than a 3.8 GHz POWER9, 7.5% slower than Graviton2, 1.5% slower than Apple M1 emulating RISC-V in qemu.

Without PGO ... it's like an A53.

Code size is AWFUL, no matter the optimisation level: 4x larger than current "normal" ISAs (x86_64, arm, riscv) at -O1 and 10x larger with PGO.

Code: [Select]

//     4.868 sec i7 3770  @ 3.9 GHz                    240 bytes  19.0 billion clocks
//     5.110 sec Blackbird POWER9 Sforza @ 3.8 GHz     380 bytes  19.4 billion clocks
//     6.377 sec AWS C6g graviton2 A64 @ 2.5 GHz       276 bytes  15.9 billion clocks
//     6.757 sec M1 Mini, qemu-riscv64 in UbuntuVM     216 bytes  23.0 billion clocks
//     6.867 sec Elbrus-8SV Raiko 1.55 GHz PGO        2664 bytes  10.6 billion clocks
//    12.115 sec Pi4 Cortex A72 @ 1.5 GHz A64          300 bytes  18.2 billion clocks
:
//    19.500 sec Odroid C2 A53 @ 1.536 GHz A64         276 bytes  30.0 billion clocks
//    20.419 sec Elbrus-8SV Raiko 1.55 GHz -O3        1120 bytes  31.7 billion clocks
:
//    27.196 sec Teensy 4.0 Cortex M7 @ 960 MHz        228 bytes  26.1 billion clocks
//    27.480 sec HiFive Unleashed RISCV U54 @ 1.45 GHz 228 bytes  39.8 billion clocks
//    28.110 sec Elbrus-8SV Raiko 1.55 GHz             984 bytes  43.6 billion clocks
//    30.420 sec Pi3 Cortex A53 @ 1.2 GHz T32          204 bytes  36.5 billion clocks
//    36.652 sec Allwinner D1 C906 RV64 @ 1.008 GHz    224 bytes  36.9 billion clocks


MCST can develop CPUs that are good enough for Open-office workloads, but they are nothing special from the performance and power efficiency points of view; nothing brilliant, the "gain" for them is that such systems may well be deployed by governments that can pay extra to support domestic CPU developers and not use foreign technologies.

At some point in the future, MCST's Elbrus processors will get so significantly faster than they are today that Russian companies will bring them to the market, at the moment is more a matter of "Technology independence", which is always something good.

Sure. although I have my doubts about "get significantly faster".

Anyway, what would make me happy, in this order
- Estonian citizenship (Ania's world is so tempting)

I have no idea who "Ania" is, but Estonia is very interesting and has done well since 1991, with a political/economic approach I'm very much in favour of. I was surprised how little use English was in the tourist part of Tallinn -- much less than in Denmark, Sweden, Finland. Or St Petersburg and central Moscow, for that matter. Fortunately I can get by in Russian, for tourist purposes.

- lot of belarusian-soda in my fridge (too delicious)

Never came across it.

- a laptop(1) with MIPS64 or RISC-V, because !YeS!

Soon! You can get a RISC-V laptop with better than Pentium 3 performance right now in the DevTerm R-01. Pi 3 performance within 6 months, 2x Pi 4 performance (something like late Core2 Quad or early i7) by this time next year, I think.

(1) Elbrus processors are based on a VLIW-like architecture, and there is nothing more I hate in the world, after x86, than the VLIW architecture

I'm well aware of the architecture. When I worked in Moscow many of my colleagues were compiler engineers ex MCST.  I've now got ssh access to one and have been reading the ISA manual and examining generated code.

I'm not a fan of VLIW for general-purpose CPUs. It's bad for exactly the same reasons that early RISC with branch delay slots and sometime no pipeline interlocks was bad, but 10x worse. It can work in very specialised situations where you can have an engineer spend six months hand optimising 100 lines of code. But make any change and you've got to throw all that work away. Plus code is inherently optimised for one particular implementation with one particular execution width and can't scale up and down a performance range.

[DiTBho]

Price unknown as yet, but if it's in RISC-V SBC range rather than the ridiculously priced Raptor Talos POWER9 boards then I'll probably get one for my collection.

yup, too bad.

By exploiting of a kind of monthly-Carnet online for flight tickets with just a couple of fly tickets left by a customer, I went to the United States with nothing but a suitcase with a pair of underpants in it, and some socks, just to keep up appearances

I ordered and paid for mini motherboard and a CPU module some days before my flight, so when arrive to The USE I took a taxi and directly went to the Talos company to pick up my order.

Everything was already packaged, no delay added, easy like a piece of cake and fast like taking a McDonald's Mac Drive, and in less than 5 minutes I was again in the taxi that was kindly waiting for taking me back.

I fit the precious "cargo" into my suitcase while we were going back to the airport.

The driver looked at me strangely, like if he had gangster passenger trying to hide something in his suitcase. I smiled, saying, "it's clean, buddy, don't worry".

But when I said that, he threw an eye to the back mirror and he saw nothing but that a foreign with a weird accent  moving his underpants, shirts and socks into the suitcase, over the *real* cargo, so he laugh. Probably he didn't understand what I was talking about and thought that my suits were not dirty, like when when you go to take them back from the laundry.

Back to airport, I spent more than a couple of hours inside the duty free area, watched a video, met a couple of hostesses, invite them to eat something together, got amazing appealing and interesting information about "free flights" if you date hostess, and then I flight back to Europe.

Happy hour, happy ending, and this way you save additional money from customs, because if Raptor Talos is priced, well ... paying duties on ~3000 Euro would makes it even worse.

Just ... once back home, you have to buy an heat-sink, a case, a power-supply, a video card, memory sticks, I mean all the rest, a bit annoying because you have to order stuff on Amazon + from other shops, but you save a lot of money.

[DiTBho]

I have no idea who "Ania" is, but Estonia is very interesting and has done well since 1991, with a political/economic approach I'm very much in favour of. I was surprised how little use English was in the tourist part of Tallinn -- much less than in Denmark, Sweden, Finland. Or St Petersburg and central Moscow, for that matter. Fortunately I can get by in Russian, for tourist purposes.

Ania is a nice and pretty Estonian girl, a student of the Tallinn University Of Technology (AKA TalTech).

She likes hack-meeting events, which are in English, a big BONUS in Estonia
So, she also talked about her world with interesting points about technology, economy, etc.

Not bad.

[tszaboo]

About the New Russian laptops by Bitblaze, see here (English article)

I wonder if you can de-lid the cpu if you strike it with a javelin.
There was so much effort put into buying things from the west. If that wasn't available, east Germany, or local, and if everything failed, you resorted buying something made there.

[DiTBho]

- lot of belarusian-soda in my fridge (too delicious)

Never came across it.

It's also known as "Bel-Cola" (white can), it was offered during the hack-meeting to celebrate newbyes and the weirdest projects ever. It's like CokaCola, just light and more delicious.

Unfortunately it's only available in Belarus. Nobody knows how it arrived to the hack-meeting in Estonia.

And, among the strangest things, I heard about the old Soviet "white" CokaCola.
Ania talked about that. Interesting story.

American "Coca Cola" is the color of coffee, at some point, during the cold war, there was a diplomatic need to make a bridge between the USA and URSS, so someone offered Coka-Cola, and some Russian important men found it so delicious that asked to have more to bring them home.

The handshake attempt was successful! At least, in terms of intentions. There was a serious BIG problem: during Soviet regime they were trying to ban every symbol of American politics, therefore they could not just offer a case of bottles of CokaCola to take away from the embassy.

The needed a workaround, enforcing the secret cooperation between USA and URSS to export CokaCola to Russia, and if the CokaCola is a symbol of American politics, Vodka is a symbol of Soviet politics!

It looked impossible, then ... someone had a brilliant idea! Let's de-color it!
Yeah, let's make CokaCola the same color as the Vodka! Problem solved!

And so they did.

The Company CokaCola secretly prepared two cases of bottles of "white" CokaCola to let a couple of men to take away from the embassy.


What are you drinking, soviet mate? Ummm, ehh ... Vodka! What else? 

[DiTBho]

I wonder if you can de-lid the cpu if you strike it with a javelin.

LOL 

There was so much effort put into buying things from the west. If that wasn't available, east Germany, or local, and if everything failed, you resorted buying something made there.

Yup, precisely!