Longsoon
After finishing that blog post, posting it and sleeping on it, realized I had not shared about Longsoon. One of the microprocessors made by China. It is based on the MIPS64 architecture. The chip has a long convoluted history starting in 2001 but just like me, they knew at that time that x86 licensing would be expensive and cumbersome and perhaps would challenge U.S. straightway. So they chose the MIPS architecture which had a niche but using that wouldn’t put it in the U.S. crosshairs. And that gamble worked for a long time. It took them around 10 years to mature the technology and understanding enough that they made a company and called it Longsoon Technology. Soon after they purchased a bunch of licenses from MIPS Technology and started to innovate on it. There is a hitch though. Longsoon is more or less a design and fabless company. All the Longsoon chips are manufactured by STMicroelectronics. STMicroelctronics has a bunch of manufacturing concerns in France, Italy, Singapore, Tunisia and Morocco. Longsoon CPU’s would most probably be manufactured in Singapore as the logistics would be much easier and simpler.
Longsoon made chips in two architectures, first is LoongISA which was there in 2015 and LoongArch that was launched in 2021. The latter series of chips seems to be mixture of having feature sets of MIPS and RISC that I shared the other day.
The story would not be complete without sharing that Longsoon was sanctioned as soon the chip started showing potential. This happened only a couple of months back. On a side-note Huawei that was sanctioned by the United States just about a year back, are hoping to be back in saddle for 5G phones by end of year. I dunno if they will be able to do that or not, but if they are able to do so, the sanctions would be seen as a joke 😦 What is more worrying is China’s rapid advance in EV’s, solar and other alternative sources of energy but that probably is another blog post in itself.
Christopher Paolini
For many people this name might be unfamiliar. If people had seen the flopped ‘Eragon’ or read the book or books then they would know about him. The Gentleman is a crazy genius. While some people may know about Eragon or even read the book, for those who haven’t let me introduce him and the story. Eragon is a story of a boy who finds a dragon egg and has various adventures with the aim of fighting Galbatorix whom he fights in the final book. The work is a tetralogy (four different works) and is known as the Inheritance cycle. It may astound you to hear as it did to me that he finished his first draft of Eragon was when he was 15. Then for next year he cleaned it up and went through few more revisions while publishing it at the tender age of 19. I didn’t know my forwards to backwards when I was 19, forget 15-16. And one needs to understand the enormity of the work undertaken. The Eragon is no simple book. It is a 600+ pages book. Even if you take each line to be 10 words and 30 lines per page then it’s 300×600 = 18000 words. And that is just the first book, all the four books have been at least 600 pages. The four books are Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr and finally Inheritance. Except for Brisingr I have read all the rest. Now while there was a movie adaption, it was a flop. Personally speaking, I think it was because of the cast and not enough reading and rehearsing. The onus is as much on the director as well as the actors to be the part. There are few LOTR channels on Youtube that I have subscribed to. In one of them there was an interview of John Rhys-Davies the actor who played Gimli in LOTR. He had shared that it took him 4 readings of the LOTR epic to understand what LOTR was about and what role Gimli had to play in it. LOTR is an easy read for me/us but then it maybe because we are attuned to it. For somebody who was not, it probably is not so easy. I guess my question would be how many people would find it easy to believe that the world sits on back of a tortoise 😉 (Discworld reference for those who may not get it.)
But there is a bigger reason to share all this, the story still continues. Few months back. Mr. Paolini shared two books that would be also be part of Aglesia (the place where all the events happen.) There would be two new books, one will be a standalone book called Murtagh. Murtagh is about the cousin of Eragon. He and his dragon Thorn are somewhat misunderstood characters. The story in Murtagh follows couple of years later where Inheritance cycle stopped. This will again be a 600 page grounder. Then there is a fifth or sixth book that also would run 600 odd pages of it. I do not when I will get my hands on either of those books, or even Brisingr. If you have read it, or the series you are welcome to share your thoughts, if not and if you liked Harry Potter or LOTR, you would like this. There is also a webseries on the anvil on Disney+ . There’s lot more to share, maybe on the weekend, till later.
Experiences in the community 