> where are Loongson 3 based computers available? In dreamland only.
> how can loongson 3 be (roughly) compared to x86 CPUs in performance? It's slower. A hell lot slower. 3A systems are running at around 1GHz. The x86 code translation stuff was benchmark-only and, to the best of my knowledge, has never been made public (with full source code and acceptable licence terms). I don't see any point in this kind of benchmark. Either you are able to recompile the x86 code on the Loongson system, and you need to compare the speed of native Loongson code versus native X86 code. Or you can only run the X86 code through the Loongson JIT-like code, and this is the least of your problems because you have no idea what the original code does and what the JIT does. Here are a few meaningless numbers: - a 1.8GHz amd64 processor is about 6 times faster than a 900MHz Loongson 2F doing md5 crypto. - the same processor is only 3 times faster doing Blowfish crypto. > Would be nice if finally some non-x86 hardware would actually be > available. It has been available for ages, and well-supported by free software as well; and I am not only speaking about loongson-based systems.