this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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Less than $400 for mobo, cpu and fan is not expensive even if it's a couple of gens behind
I mean, it's a 4 core MIPS CPU, tops out at 2.5GHz and apparently compares to an i3 10100F, which is pretty much "reheated Skylake". This with native code.
It can translate x86 and ARM code in theory, but I can imagine the performance degradation. You can buy this if you want, I know I won't
If it runs Linux no need to translate anything. It's been a while since I ran Unix on a MIPS CPU but it should just work.
Not every app on Linux is compiled for MIPS, or am I wrong? I mean, technically Windows 8 RT could run natively on ARM without problems, except you couldn't run any apps, which made the whole thing 100% useless.
Unless every app can run natively, you'll always have to run some sort of translation layer, either in software, hardware or both. That layer will have native performance.
In a Linux distribution for a particular architecture all code is compiled to the underlying CPU architecture. Packages can also be built from source.
Proprietary software is different since it doesn't give you the freedom to build things from scratch. There are emulators, of course, but they all fundamentally suck.
Not all code is written portable. Say, many things won't compile or won't work under PPC64.
MIPS64 is not a very common architecture today. We know XOrg, FVWM and Emacs will probably work, so I expect this thing to be usable for many things. But not just as good as Linux on amd64.
https://www.debian.org/ports/mips/ supports Loongson 3 so it seems everything I'd need is in the green.
I can get an AMD 7800X3D, a b650 mobo, and 32Gb of DDR5 RAM for $500 right now in a bundle from my local Microcenter. I bought that exact bundle for like $425 a few months ago when I rebuilt my gaming PC because they happened to have some other sale running that stacked with the bundle price. Gimme a modern x64 processor and DDR5 RAM I know will feasibly last me like 10 years for a few extra bucks any day.