Chinese company Loongson introduces 3A5000 processor with its own instruction set
Chinese chip manufacturer Loongson has announced a new CPU. The Loongson 3A5000 is a quad-core processor with clock speeds of 2.3 to 2.5GHz. It is the first chip to operate on Loongson’s proprietary instruction set architecture, LoongArch.
The cores in the Loongson 3A5000 each have four alu’s and two 256-bit vector operation units, CNTechPost also writes. It is therefore a superscalar processor, which means that the CPU can execute several instructions at the same time. The 3A5000 soc features two DDR4-3200 controllers with support for ecc. Loongson previously announced that the processor will be made at 12nm, although the company does not say which manufacturer this happens with.
The cores are based on the LoonArch GS464V instruction set architecture, which, according to Loongson’s previous reports, contains nearly 2,000 proprietary instructions. The company also reports that it has removed outdated instructions. Loongson claims that the new 3A5000 chip performs up to fifty percent better than the previous LS3A4000 CPU, which is based on the MIPS64 instruction set. According to the manufacturer, the CPU achieves SpecCPU2006 scores of 26 on a single core and 80 when using all four cores.
At the same time, the chip would consume 30 percent less power than its predecessor. For this, the manufacturer has implemented dynamic clock speeds and dynamic voltage regulation to control the power consumption, among other things.
Loongson previously announced that its LoongArch processors would support MIPS64 instructions. The new isa also supports several compilers, including LLVM, GCC, and GoLang. The chip would also support Java, JavaScript and NET, writes CNTechPost. The chip also supports some encryption standards, such as SM2, SM3 and SM4. The Loongson 3A5000 is mainly sold to Chinese OEMs. The suggested retail price is therefore unknown.
The Chinese chipmaker also announces a 3C5000 chip, ITHome writes. That CPU is intended for servers and has 16 cores with a clock speed of 2.2GHz. This server processor would be based on four 3A5000 chips. Manufacturers could combine four such 3C5000 CPUs into a single server, for a total of 64 cores.
The Loongson 3A5000 (left) and Loongson 3C5000. Source: ITHome.com