Loongson 3A5000 Benchmarks For These New Chinese CPUs Built On The LoongArch ISA

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Loongson 3A5000 Benchmarks For These New Chinese CPUs Built On The LoongArch ISA

While Loongson has been known for their MIPS-based Loongson chips that are open-source friendly and have long been based on MIPS, with MIPS now being a dead-end, the Chinese company has begun producing chips using its own "LoongArch" ISA. The first Loongson 3A5000 series hardware was just announced and thanks to the company apparently using the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org we have some initial numbers...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Loongson-3A5000-Benchmark

[Doomsdayrs]

Intriguing technology, Its a shame foreign chip designs have been so slow to build up. Soon we can see some intriguing chip designs

[sdack]

If one can trust the hardware specs, such as 2.3GHz and 16MB L3 cache, then the problem if the slow speed is likely a software issue.

[torsionbar28]

Intriguing technology, Its a shame foreign chip designs have been so slow to build up. Soon we can see some intriguing chip designs

How so? ARM has been around for a while, and is becoming increasingly popular. Acorn PC's with ARM chips were the standard in British schools in the late 80's, much like the Apple II was in US schools.

As for a new entrant competing with Intel or AMD in the mainsteam CPU market, it's impossible for anyone without many $Billions in the bank to spend. Why spend a few $Bil when you can order a Ryzen chip for $279 and have amazing performance? There has to be some other reason for new players to get into the game, in this case, it is the CCP wanting to move away from foreign sourced CPU's. The CCP's communist ideology pressures them to reduce reliance on Western goods, and the past 25 years of unbalanced trade has netted them a mountain of cash to spend. Plus they have a large enough population to enable volume production for exclusively domestic China consumption. It is this unique position that motivates them, so I would not expect others to be joining the CPU fray any time soon.

[nemequ]

Documentation of the architecture is at https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/

The instruction set looks very MIPS-like; they use the same naming conventions, and a lot of the instruction names I recognize (I'm very much not a MIPS expert) match.

The SIMD support is interesting; it can support 128-bit and 256-bit vectors. Everyone else these days is just jumping straight from 128-bit to scalable vectors, but it looks like LoongArch is going to join x86 with fixed-width 256-bit vectors. It's hard to be sure, though, since the SIMD documentation is missing and the basic architecture documentation doesn't provide a lot of information.

There are feature flags for binary translation from x86, Arm, and MIPS.

[uid313]

It seems rather foolish to create a new instruction set architecture instead of just adopting RISC-V and get all that kernel support, compilers, toolchains, and all that already made just for free already.

[sdack]

It seems rather foolish to create a new instruction set architecture instead of just adopting RISC-V and get all that kernel support, compilers, toolchains, and all that already made just for free already.

It is never foolish to make your own experiences. It is only foolish if it means you could fail at it or pay a too high price for it. Neither will be a problem for China, and making their own experiences will be a benefit to them.

RISC-V then still needs to prove itself and there is not much RISC-V on the mass market yet, but it has to compete against x86 and Arm first. However, Loongson is said to have copied much from x86 and Arm, but avoids licensing problems. So while China is making their own experience do they copy from what has already proven itself many times over.

[leo_sk]

Although I would love to see diversity in CPU space, anything coming from China that makes them more independent from American tech is just going to embolden them further

[tuxd3v]

Loongson is an Open Arch,
I don't know were the next line of CPUs will be made but they are produced in France by STMicroElectronics..

I heard something about they shifting to 16 nm process, and going to Asia to produce the next version( which for me will become less appealing.. ).

[Brane215]

The Loongson 3A5000 is a step forward for China in domestically made PC/server processors using their own "LoongArch" ISA but of all the public data so far on OpenBenchmarking.org I haven't seen any points putting it remotely close to modern x86_64 or ARMv8 hardware.

Neither Loongson nor upcoming RISC-V implementations aren't meant to compete with the top.
They are being introduced to:
- offer alternative to backdoor-infested 14EYES parnetrs stuff
- give China tools to control their own territory through their own HW
- open the doors into new tech ecosystem and present good start into CPU etc design
- educate workforce through real-life project
- open the road to the top through initial first steps.

First Loongsons were pure MIPS copy, then they've increasingly got new bits and their development crowd was widening.
Now with RISC-V development has reached outside governemnt sponsored projects and is taking in industry.

They are growing strategically.
Few years ago "Chinese FPGA" meant something that has fallen off production line.
Now they have quite lively market and their own versions.
They might be small and cheap, but they obviously sell in big quantities.

And China is not alone. Others are doing the same.
Real life James Bonds don't like to pay production costs for the stuff the turn into crap.
After all those "oopsies" and "exploits" migration off leading global systems is real option everywhere.

I hope Intel's share holders understand that "Israel has the right to exist" on every CPU die etcetc.