The Chinese company Loongson has released a 64-core processor based on a unique architecture. What kind of chip is this?
What's new?
The company has new chips, the most productive processors for the entire line. These are the E6000 for servers, the 3C6000 for regular PCs, and the 3D6000 for workstations. The 3E6000 processor, the most productive chip in this line, has great prospects, as far as we can judge. According to the developers, it is equal to the Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids in terms of the number of cores.
Loongson 3E6000 has 64 cores and 128 threads, but its own architecture, called LoongArch. After the Chinese released a chip based on it, they began to actively develop the entire line. The company is now reaping the fruits of its labors. In order to achieve 64 cores, the company had to make its processor modular, i.e. chiplet.
Here everything is quite simple: the Chinese use autonomous processors as modules. It turns out that four basic 16-core 32-thread 3C6000, placed on one substrate, are combined in one chip. This is if we are talking about server processors.
The same principle applies to workstation chips. In this case, two 3C6000 crystals are used. The company has been using this principle quite successfully to develop the line for several years.
It is worth noting that it also uses the Loongson Coherent Link bus developed by itself. According to the developers, its characteristics are approximately equal to the NVLink bus, which is used in modern video cards and accelerators from Nvidia.
When to expect the processor?
Now, according to company representatives, the new line has passed all tests, and it will go into production in the last quarter of 2024. Most likely, by the end of the year these processors, if they are released so quickly, will arrive in the Russian Federation.
Of course, we would like to know the characteristics of the chips, but so far the manufacturer has not disclosed all the information. But it is known that the processor for desktop stations includes 16 LA664 cores. According to the company's representatives, these cores have twice the performance of the previous version.
The 3C6000 is also said to support up to four channels of DDR4-3200 memory. That's not cutting edge, but that's okay considering the Chinese chips are being developed from scratch.
What else?
The Chinese are introducing their new products quite quickly. For example, a couple of months ago a mini-PC appeared with a Loongson 3A6000 processor on board. This is the previous version of the chips, which is capable of handling most office tasks.
As usual, the Chinese device received a pre-installed Chinese OS. This is Loongnix based on Linux, but can be replaced with Windows or Ubuntu if desired. The developers claim that their device is not for solving any problems that require high performance. The device can be used to work with office applications, industrial programs, in medicine, etc.
Yes, other devices are also based on Chinese processors. For example, a laptop was released based on 3A5000 →—this is the previous generation.
Characteristics
• Processor: Loongson 3A5000 2.0 GHz.
• RAM: 8 GB RAM.
• Hard Drive: 256GB SSD.
• Operating system: UOS/Galaxy Kirin/loongnix.
• Screen: 14-inch display.
We found it on Aliexpress – the cost is about 160 thousand rubles. The device has basic capabilities, but it has a metal body. In general, the developer positions the laptop as an ultra-light device. It can also be used to solve office tasks, for example, when traveling.
Unique architecture
No joke, it was truly developed from scratch by the Chinese. Why does the company need a new architecture? She decided to go independent after MIPS Technologies switched to RISC-V. Previously, MIPS Technologies was involved in architecture development and licensing of intellectual property associated with MIPS processors. The company did not produce the chips themselves, but the reborn organization will produce processors based on the RISC-V architecture.
The new architecture was evaluated by independent experts several years ago. They found out that it has nothing in common with ALPHA, ARM, MIPS, POWER, RISC-V or x86. The company has developed its own instruction format, encoding, addressing modes, etc. LoongArch contains about 2,000 proprietary instructions.
According to the developers, they removed legacy instructions to provide lower power consumption and more efficient operation. In addition to the base instruction set, the company added Binary Transformation Extension (LBT) instructions, Vector Processing Extension (LSX) instructions, Extended Vector Processing Extension (LASX) instructions, and Virtualization Extension (LVZ) instructions.
The Chinese are making significant progress in the development of the electronics development and production industry. It is likely that the Celestial Empire will soon become independent of third-party technologies – there are all the prerequisites for this, including government support and the desire of businesses to create modern chips.
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