Loongson Linux Work Continues - Dual Socket Support, Loongson-7A1000 Enablement

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Loongson Linux Work Continues - Dual Socket Support, Loongson-7A1000 Enablement

Loongson, the Chinese MIPS64 CPUs that are becoming more common within China but not so much internationally, continues seeing better Linux kernel support. There has been a fair amount of Loongson Linux work in recent months including in the current 5.7 cycle while more should be on tap for Linux 5.8...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Loongson-More-Patches-Ahead-5.8

[squash]

Having worked quite a bit with MIPS systems before they were relegated to routers, I'm excited at the possibility of MIPS making a comeback. They were a force to contend with in their day, competing against PA-RISC, Alpha, Sparc. They made the jump to 64 bit way back in 1991, 12 years before AMD sold their first AMD64 enabled chip. In 1993 you could buy workstations with 4 64 bit MIPS R4k processors, and in 1996 you could buy a MIPS server with up to 128 R Whatever happen10k CPUs (later increased to 512).

Unfortunately, the owners of MIPS at the time (SGI) fell for the same itanium story the same as everyone else, and announced that they would cease development of MIPS and focus instead on Intel's holy vapor. Sometimes I wonder if Intel know itanium would fail in the marketplace but decided it was worth it to kill off MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, etc and move everyone to Xeon, but that may be giving them too much credit. Whatever their intent, they all but destroyed the server CPU market.

[portablenuke]

Everyone thought Intel could pull it off. Intel had no intention of continuing to build x86 chips, and it was only because of AMD and AMD64 x86 survived.