[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Rich Jordan <jordan at ccs4vms.com> wrote:

> "...  It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including
> the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering
> a DEC Alpha CPU."

> When you care enough to steal the very best...

Reverse engineering is one thing, copying another.

There are stories of a Russian 8080 made by generating masks
directly from an extracted 8080 chip, including the intel 
copyright symbol. (Slightly bigger and slower, though.)

One should be able to avoid copyright by reimplementing the ISA
from the architecture description. One then only has to worry about
any patents (which might have expired) and trademarks.

-- glen