Another Chinese Me-too Project
Interesting but what a waste of good research talent! The hard reality is that any new processor that does not solve the parallel programming crisis is on a fast road to failure. No long march to victory in sight for the Loongson, sorry.
China should be trying to become a leader in this field, not just another me-too follower. There is an unprecedented opportunity to make a killing in the parallel processor industry in the years ahead. Intel may have cornered the market for now but they have an Achilles' heel: they are way too big and way too married to last century's flawed computing paradigms to change in time for the coming massively parallel computer revolution. Their x86 technology will be worthless when that happens. The trash bins of Silicon Valley will be filled with obsolete Intel chips.
Here's the problem. The computer industry is in a very serious crisis due to processor performance limitations and low programmer productivity. Going parallel is the right thing to do but the current multicore/multithreading approach to parallel computing is a disaster in the making. Using the erroneous Turing Machine-based paradigms of the last sixty years to solve this century's massive parallelism problem is pure folly. Intel knows this but they will never admit it because they've got too much invested in the old stuff. Too bad. They will lose the coming processor war. That's where China and Intel's competitors can excel if they play their cards right.
The truth is that the thread concept (on which the Loongson and Intel's processors are based) is the cause of the crisis, not the solution. There is an infinitely better way to build and program computers that does not involve threads at all. Sooner or later, an unknown startup will pop out of nowhere and blow everybody out of the water.
My advice to China, Intel, AMD and the other big dogs is this: first invest your resources into solving the parallel programming crisis. Only then will you know enough to properly tackle the embedded systems, supercomputing and cloud computing markets. Otherwise be prepared to lose a boatload of dough. When that happens, there shall be much weeping and gnashing of teeth but I'll be eating popcorn with a smirk on my face and saying "I told you so".
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis:
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-solve-parallel-programming.html