2 weeks Ago By Simon Sharwood
Chinese chip designer Loongson, whose products have been promoted by China’s government, has teased two new designs that will make it more of a contender for mobile and industrial applications. It may also have a new server up its sleeve. Loongson has created its own “Loongarch” instruction set architecture that blends elements of MIPS and RISC-V technology.
The company’s desktop chips are about five years behind product from Intel or AMD, but that hasn’t stopped China piloting them in a 10,000-PC trial at select schools. Loongson chips have also been sent into space to run a cloud computing platform on China’s space station. Down on Earth, Lenovo delivered a version of its server virtualization platform for Loongarch, and the Linux kernel has added some support for the architecture.
On Wednesday Loongson announced it had successfully taped out two new processors, the model 2K3000 and model 3B6000M. The company said the two chips can be produced on the same wafer but are packaged differently. Both therefore include eight of Loongson’s LA364E processor cores (which are probably 64-bit), and a new model LG 200 GPU said to deliver single-precision floating-point peak performance of 256GFLOPS and an 8-bit fixed-point peak performance of 8TOPS.
Machine translation of Loongson’s announcement of the chips claims they achieved “single-core fixed-point score reaches 30 points based on the actual SPEC CPU2006 Base test at a main frequency of 2.5GHz.” It’s hard to know what to make of that as SPEC CPU 2006 is a benchmarking test that was retired in 2018.
But eight-core CPUs at 2.5GHz won’t scare Intel or AMD, as they’re already shipping more capable processors that include neural processing units with 40 TOPS performance – never mind the power of their GPUs. Loongson has suggested the 2K3000 for industrial control applications and pitched the 3B6000M at laptops.
Manufacturers who use the 3B6000M in laptops won’t need to compromise as the chip can handle 4K video at 60 frames per second, and supports PCIe3.0, USB3.0 and USB2.
0, SATA3.0, and the eMMC socket used for slow-ish flash memory typically soldered onto motherboards. Lappies using the chips can chose between Loongson’s own Linux-derived Loongnix, or other Chinese distros like Kylin that can run on the Loongarch architecture.
Beijing will likely encourage Chinese hardware-makers to get behind these processors and buy plenty of computers that contain them. Whether consumers will follow is hard to say, as Loongson hasn’t attracted many big brand PC players. It also faces competition from established consumer brands like Huawei which adapting its HarmonyOS for PCs and already has a sales channel capable of shifting 46 million smartphones a year.
It's been a busy couple of weeks for Loongson, which according to Chinese media last week showed off a 64-core server grade CPU and a two-socket server of its own design to house them. Also last week the company published a list of 120 applications compatible with its architecture, among them plenty of software for healthcare operations, plus databases, and office suites. That list of software means Chinese organizations that have taken note of Beijing’s many directives to favor home-grown have fewer excuses for staying in the x86 ecosystem, a choice that may be even less palatable after the USA this week imposed 54 percent tariffs on Chinese goods.
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