Monday, April 10th 2023
Chinese Loongson 3D5000 Features 32 Cores and is 4x Faster Than the Average Arm Chip
Amid the push for technology independence, Chinese companies are pushing out more products to satisfy the need for the rapidly soaring demand for domestic data processing silicon. Today, we have information that Chinese Loongson has launched a 3D5000 CPU with as many as 32 cores. Utilizing chiplet technology, the 3D5000 represents a combination of two 16-core 3C5000 processors based on LA464 cores, based on LoongArch ISA that follows the combination of RISC and MIPS ISA design principles. The new chip features 64 MB of L3 cache, supports eight-channel DDR4-3200 ECC memory achieving 50 GB/s, and has five HyperTransport (HT) 3.0 interfaces. The TDP configuration of the chip is officially 300 Watts; however, normal operation is usually at around 150 Watts, with LA464 cores running at 2 GHz.
Scaling of the new chip goes beyond the chiplet, and pours over into system, as 3D5000 supports 2P and 4P configurations, where a single motherboard can become a system of up to 128 cores. To connect them, Loongson uses a 7A2000 bridge chip that is reportedly 400% faster than the previous solution, although we have no information about the last chip bridge. Based on the LGA-4129 package, the chip size is 75.4x58.5×6.5 mm. Regarding performance, Loongson compares it to the average Arm chip that goes into smartphones and claims that its designs are up to four times faster. In SPEC2006, performance reaches 425 points, while maintaining a single TeraFLOP at dual-precision 64-bit format. On the other hand, the processor was built for security, as the chip has a custom hardware-baked security to prevent Spectre and Meltdown, has an on-package Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and has a secret China-made security algorithm with an embedded custom security module that does encryption and decryption at 5 Gbps.
Source:
MyDrivers
Scaling of the new chip goes beyond the chiplet, and pours over into system, as 3D5000 supports 2P and 4P configurations, where a single motherboard can become a system of up to 128 cores. To connect them, Loongson uses a 7A2000 bridge chip that is reportedly 400% faster than the previous solution, although we have no information about the last chip bridge. Based on the LGA-4129 package, the chip size is 75.4x58.5×6.5 mm. Regarding performance, Loongson compares it to the average Arm chip that goes into smartphones and claims that its designs are up to four times faster. In SPEC2006, performance reaches 425 points, while maintaining a single TeraFLOP at dual-precision 64-bit format. On the other hand, the processor was built for security, as the chip has a custom hardware-baked security to prevent Spectre and Meltdown, has an on-package Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and has a secret China-made security algorithm with an embedded custom security module that does encryption and decryption at 5 Gbps.
18 Comments on Chinese Loongson 3D5000 Features 32 Cores and is 4x Faster Than the Average Arm Chip
Their 3A variant had 140+ ns of memory latency. Who knows what this has.
Shocking, a desktop chip with multiple chiplets and a 300 W power target is "up to 4 times faster" than your average <5 W smartphone chip.
Slow clap.
Also there might have a typo in the title, 400% faster is 5x not 4x.
The CPU itself is up to 4x faster.
So, maybe, in the long run, we will have another contender for budget-friendly desktop chips as we had in the 90´s. (Cyrix, Via, etc), specially one that, aparently, are backed by the chinese government.
Dream on, my dude. And those companies were so successful in offering "budget friendly" chips in the 90's that you can still buy their stuff today! /s
I wouldn't touch one of these Chinese chips with a ten foot pole, for a variety of reasons.
For a third world market (I live in a Third World country), a cheap but useable processor for internet and office will be great. Even top of the line ARM processors for mobile are almost inaccessible. (Here Apple has only 8% market share because it cost a lot! - a new iPhone cost more than 84% of the population annual income). Remember those Asus eepcs? Sold like water in here (from gray markets of course because legal importation was impossible at that time). Until mid 2000's PCChips, ECS motherboards wore the kings here. Now any Asus TUF board causes the "WOW" effect...
So, maybe not in Europe or North America, but I can see these kind of chips on a lot o places in the long run.
Besides, 4x performance with 8x as many cores... um... okay?
This mostly affected business PCs since AMT is not usually found in consumer hardware. On the other hand the possibility of having this kind of access (AMT is OS-independent and can control every aspect from power through VNC-like remote control to remote OS installation) is scary. It can move every exploit in the "needs local access" category to "remotely exploitable".
Intel ME's PR is not being helped by the fact that the NSA has an official kill-switch for it. One of the links in that article demonstrates malware running on/in Intel ME as well.
Even reading through the ME/AMT Wikipedia pages can give a security-conscious user some nightmare fuel ;)
Silicon from outside of the "mainstream" channels always fascinates me.
I'm not saying SV is better; we dont know whats inside a Intel or AMD cpu really either.
Also NSA could share stuff with my country, because their are "allies" and i use other US made spyware like google for example. I'm sure China wouldn't share shit with my country, and i really don't know what they would do with it and i never used bilibili or whatever.
Good for China, i'm sure they will pass the western tech in a question of a decade or so anyway. We pushed them to it.
Also what's going on with the DDR4 bandwidth? Each DDR4 channel at 3200 MT/s should be able to do 25.6GB/s but it seems like loongson can only get a quarter of that per channel?