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I sometimes wonder if it'll be a selling point of Chinese CPUs in the future, "our CPU might not be the fastest, but it's the only one running at any given time!".

People don't need "flagship" CPUs for every single purpose. There is no reason why one cannot have a slower more private system for specific purposes, say general purpose computing, and the faster one with the autonomous network-aware CPU and OS be used for games only or something.



Issue here is that I trust the Chinese even less to not have something like this hidden in the hardware.


Interesting it is the Chinese processors (e.g. Allwinner, T-Head, Rockchip) that happen to be free of this secure boot garbage by default. If you want to you can blow an efuse (with power applied to the VPP pin) and enable secure boot. But otherwise it's off.

I am waiting for a high performance ARM or RISC-V chip that's on par with AMD and Intel performance. One without secure boot. The moment that comes out, my Ryzen system is going in the bin immediately.


On par? Depends which year you're targeting and perhaps what applications. If you mean on par with current year then it'll be a long time before that happens because AMD and Intel are able to run power-hungry while ARM and RISC-V try to use less power.


>If you mean on par with current year then it'll be a long time

Tenstorrent Ascalon, a RISC-V CPU TBA 2024, has performance competitive with projected Zen5 performance, while using less power.

As Zen5 is also TBA 2024, they'll be on par in the same year.

RISC-V is inevitable.


if my Starfive RISC-V boards start dialing home they won't get much out of me other than second hand frustration with learning a new platform.




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