China initiatively decouples from United States on PC processor

China initiatively decouples from United States on PC processor

China initiatively decouples from United States on PC processor. 

On August 1st, Loongson Information Technology Co., Ltd. (Loongson) announced it has successfully taped out their latest generation of quad-core processors, the Loongson 3A6000, based on their independent architecture set architecture known as LoongArch.

The new processor is the first product of Loongson’s fourth-generation microarchitecture and integrates four high-performance 6-issue 64-bit LA664 processor cores.

Running at a frequency of 2.5GHz, the processor supports 128-bit Vector Processing Extension (LSX) and 256-bit Advanced Vector Processing Extension (LASX), as well as simultaneous multi-threading technology (SMT2), resulting in a total of 8 logical cores on the chip.

The Loongson 3A6000 also incorporates a dual-channel DDR4-3200 controller and a built-in security trusted module, providing support for secure boot and Chinese national cryptography algorithms (SM2, SM3, SM4, etc.).

Compared to its predecessor, the Loongson 3A5000 desktop CPU, the Loongson 3A6000 demonstrates a single-thread performance increase of over 60% and a significant improvement in multi-threaded performance on the same process.

According to testing results from China Electronics Technology Standardization Institute’s Saixi Laboratory, the Loongson 3A6000 quad-core processor achieved SPEC CPU 2006 base single-threaded integer/floating-point scores of 43.1/54.6 and SPEC CPU 2006 base multi-threaded integer/floating-point scores of 155/140 at a frequency of 2.5GHz.

Furthermore, the measured Stream memory bandwidth with dual DDR4-3200 channels exceeded 42GB/s, and the Unixbench score exceeded 7400 points.

Overall, the performance of the Loongson 3A6000 processor is comparable to Intel’s 10th generation Core i7 quad-core processors launched in 2020.

What is The architecture of Loongson’s processor?

The architecture of Loongson’s processor is LoongArch. Loongson had deep ties with MIPS, and from the beginning, they designed their own CPUs based on the MIPS architecture.

The previous LoongISA architecture was also an extension based on MIPS.

However, for various reasons, the MIPS architecture became a constraint for further development of Loongson.

Therefore, Loongson decisively shifted all its products to the self-developed LoongArch architecture.