I think the process is very far behind the 3nm used by Intel and ARM SOC makers, so performance per watt will take a hit.

You can just buy them off AliExpress, I've got myself a 3A6000 board from there - it's an interesting machine, feels much like a (UEFI) PC and is sure faster than any readily available ARM SBC, about the level of Zen1 I'd say.

Loongson (the company) have been around since 2001.

Loongarch (the ISA that debian is now supporting) has only been around since 2021. Previously Loongson used MIPS and another ISA known as LoongISA.

I thought they pivoted to RISC-V

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Strategic_background

Well, that's what you get when you can do nation-state planning with an event horizon measured in decades, practically infinite cash and with the ruthlessness to engage in corporate espionage plus the total elimination of political campaigning (because you're the CCP, the only gang in town).

In contrast, Western corporate execs have an event horizon between "next quarterly reports" and "vesting/bonus period", additionally in any sufficiently large organizations you will have fiefdom fights that are counterproductive to the company at large, and Western politicians can only think to "next important election", so basically a few months as well because there is always an election going on in some state or local division.

We have gotten societally incompatible with not just coming up with new ideas, but with maintaining what we already have. It's like in 1984 - we can't even think of such timeframes any more.

And no, I'm not calling for a dictatorship. I'm rather calling for dissolution of the stock market for speculation, and for consolidating elections to once every four years so that politicians have time to cool down from the constant campaign hype pressure.

Yes, and that machine was exceptionally good; by far the best laptop i ever owned: mate screen, good keyboard, small and lightweight for the time, and exceptionally open and well supported for Linux despite being a mips arch. I would gladly get myself another one if I could.

You surely meant to write "a loong way", right?

Are there RISC-V chips with comparable performance for desktops and laptops on the market?

There seems to be a community-run site about this:

https://loongfans.cn/en/pages/intro.html#i-m-sold-where-can-...

You can buy LoongArch hardware on AliExpress, for example.