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Huawei's new CPU matches AMD's Zen 3 in single-core performance
(www.tomshardware.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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This is good news. I'm looking forward to more competition for chips. This will be better for us consumers. Prices will go down, and quality will go up.
its for servers because its not tied down by consumer software.
Huawei doesnt have a x86-64 license so they wouldnt have access to consumer desktop/laptop software, unless they choose to go arm and design a translation layer, on top of get a major os company onboard to use their design.
one of the strongest positions apple has is they control the entire vertical stack for their business except the fab, so its easier to tightly integrate hardware design to the consumer programs. huaweis software stack wouldnt hold up in its current state. servers dont care because all of their software is tailored specifically to hardware by said company.
Bold of you to assume that a Chinese company will care about licenses and patents. When they want to employ this Huawei will either purchase said license on the cheap or they will put up a giant middle finger and disrupt the market and patent holders.
they actually kinda do, and have a history of it...
the Zhaoxin ZX-F series are based on patents that AMD allowed them to use and a joint venture with VIA, who still holds an x86 licence. The Powerstar P3 is essentially a rebranded i3-10105.
companies in China alreay have a history of following up with getting the okay for CPU designs, id argue its bold of you to automatically assume the opposite given history disagrees with you directly in this market.
Huawei does indeed have a good track record and history regarding IP, but I would say there is a cultural expectation of cooperation with IP holders, and if that cooperation is perceived to be lacking then the IP rights are disregarded. The balance of power is not the same as it is with American/European countries. Which is what I mean when I say they will pick up the licensing rights on the cheap, or they will give a middle finger.
The western world is not exactly cooperating with Huawei(for better or worse), and it's likely that they may "return fire" if given sufficient motivation.
and thats completely bassed on assumptions that they will do it, but with history's sake, it currently says the opposite, and its kind of haphazard to junp to the extreme end immediately.
the main differemce is that for consumer use, you not only need the hardware, but the cooperation with all the software developers, many which are international to get performamt hardware.
Take for example with GPUs and Moore's Threads. they can develop a gpu, and repurposing it for server use is doable, as you have he company buying it, programing the software to work with the hardware. but the moment you bring a hardware like that to the consumer space, despite its compute performamce, it fails to launch a lot of typical consumer applications and usecases because of two fronts, consumer software is developers around the world, and you need to support their region or have a large enough market using the hardware for them to even remotely consider optimizing for the hardware, and the drivers need to be well done. Both Moore's Threads and Intel show that its not remotely easy to make consumer level drivers.
You're right, I do have a very pessimistic outlook on this subject. I personally see this as an emerging battle of sorts between the technology sector of the West and China, but it may not be that dire. There may still be hope for cooperation and positive competition.
You're also right about there being a large software development component that would be made less likely by a shaky future. Though I think that could be overcome by force and focus, and I have to admit, that is something I respect about the Chinese tech sector.
I am also pretty amazed in general with the progress that's been made on these chips in such a short time, props to them for that.
Give them a few years, they'll ace that too
developing an OS isnt that easy. even in apples case, x86 emulation has a lot of penalties for high performance computing.
Linux and RISC-V exist.
and the adoption rate of risc-v and linux combined on consumers is?
im not saying its impossible, but the discussion ia about the viability for consumers, and unless you have a plan on getting a lot consumers on it, its not going to be easy.
if risc-v + linux is already big, Pine64 would be rolling in cash right now because thats their market but clearly it hasnt happened yet.
Linux has a %100 market share in servers. It was around 4% on the Desktop. If the Chinese start adopting Linux desktop en-masse, you can see those numbers change overnight.
China now makes domestic chips for mobile and server. Desktop is not far away.
consumer use of desktop use in china is stringent on pc cafe sales. unless huawei has a plan on having a high performance cpu for existing x86-64 applications, cafes arent going to use them. even leased cpu designs like those by Zhaoxin havent penetrated the market. There have already been several attempts but none has exactly hit yet, because they havent really gone the extra mile for consumer performance. its easy for servers because the company buying the chips tailor their software for the chips. for consumers, its extremely impractical for the hardware company rewrite all software for the hardware.
Desktop market is tiny compared to mobile and desktop. It makes sense they are going after that last. Given their recent successes, there is no reason why they can't also win that market. They have won eveeywhere else.
the topic is on competion with zen 3, so the main market its adressing is the laptop/desktop business. they would have to rewrite an entire OS system in order for it to take off for consumers, consumers only care if all the stuff they need works, includng any industry level stuff. if they are only designing a laptop to do basic shit, there would be zero reason to develop a different cpu when they already have the low power consumption market in the bag. the only reason why you would target zen 3 performance is you plan on supporting industry level applications consumers may use (e.g adobe suite) which of course requires cooperation with any businesses attached to it, and tight integration with the OS.