BiscottiGelato

intersting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

BiscottiGelato

I think they are making it MIPS instruction set compatible. Not so much buying a MIPS core. One'd want to make your chip compatible with a popular instruction set, otherwise you'll have no usable SW on it. The wiki page i pasted far back in Page 2 mentioned that one can compile Linux/Unix etc for Longsoon MIPS quite easily.

As someone stated before, AMD and Intel are both x86 instruction set compatible, but doesn't mean that they 'used' the x86 core, nor AMD used Intel's core, nor AMD used Intel's core.

BiscottiGelato

Fujitsu is making processors against SPARC
China dudes is making processors against MIPS

Only difference is SPARC is open source and Fujitsu is on the spec committee. Where-as MIPS is not, and those Chinese guys probably had to pay good $ to get the license to use it. Aside from that I don't really see the difference. I'd say both shall be credited the same.

Whether Fujitsu acquired company/team/people/IP for their initial development against SPARC I have no clue. Tho I'd think you'd often hire more people when you start a project and ideally, you'll hire people with experience. Buying or referencing existing IPs, as long as you have the appropriate right in doing so, is in my opinion not a 'lowly copying' act,

Just as the Chinese dudes. I'm sure they hired people that have experience in MIPS architecture, perhaps previously employed by companies that have developed ASIC with MIPS cores, etc. I wouldn't be surprised they referenced/borrwed from a lot of existing ASIC design, and other IPs, with the appropriate right to use such IPs or not, when they developed their own MIPS based processor.

BiscottiGelato

Moi, no need to shout all caps...

I see where peter is going.
Fujitsu bought HAL, including designs personel and expertise for a SPARC compatible core.
Longsoon designed their own MIPS compatible core.
That's the difference.

MIPS32/64/x86/SPARC, etc is just an architecture standard. It's just a spec on register space and instruction set. When we say we are designing, we are talking about RTLs, VHDL/Verilog codes. In this case, Fujitsu bought out HAL which had design/personel/expertise, and thus is far from starting from scratch. Longsoon started from scratch (or we'll presume unless proven otherwise).

If Longsoon is paying and buying a MIPS core (which MIPS also makes aside from just doing license for just the architecture), then it'd not be developing the core themselves in this case.

That said, even if a core is purchased, you still need to design a bunch of stuff around the core to call it a microprocessor. Memory bridges, various memory controllers, bus controllers, interrupt controllers, memory spaces, interblock communication channels, etc etc... Fujitsu probably got some of these off HAL also.

This doesn't mean that Fujitsu might not have their own ASIC design capability however. Just happened that their SPARC expertise is acquired instead of in-house developed. Which at times, acquisition is a much smarter move, both economically and technically than in-house design from scratch. To completely develop something in-house just to claim that it's a all China/Japan/etc design makes no business sense what-so-ever.

I work in the ASIC industry. Not one of the sharpest pencil in the box, but I think I can explain more if there's still confusion over design vs architecture.