Loongson's 3A6000 Brings Simultaneous Multi-Threading To LoongArch

Since last month Loongson engineers have begun posting Linux patches enabling their upcoming 3A6000 series LoongArch processors under Linux. Yesterday they posted new patches and revealed that Loongson 3A6000 processors support Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT).

Similar to Intel, AMD, and POWER, Loongson 3A6000 processors will have Simultaneous Multi-Threading. This is 2-way SMT to double the number of threads / logical cores of the processors.

The new Linux patch posted by a Loongson engineer now exposes the proper topology on these LoongArch CPUs for being able to detect the two logical cores per physical core.

In the patch message it notes a 3A6000 model having four cores / eight threads, but it's not clear if that is their flagship processor model or a lower-end SKU.

It will be interesting to see how effective Loongson's SMT implementation is and ultimately how competitive or not are these 3A6000 processors considering the initial LoongArch-based 3A5000 processors are rather slow and fail to compete with recent generations of Intel and AMD processors.