Chinese Loongson 3A6000 CPU Matches Intel "Raptor Lake" IPC

[TheLostSwede]

It's not just the architecture. They steal design patents on the manufacturing equipment. I have sat in meetings with the FBI about concerns with China stealing IP from my current employer, and we are not a big company. It is happening in every industry in China and I'll be skeptical of any new tech coming out of China.

Love you work by the way. Keep it up!

I thought we were discussing Longsoon and not all xinese companies, but ok, yes, I guess if we're talking more broadly, it happens a lot.

 

[kondamin]

I don't know if that is impressive.
But i'm pretty certain it will be more than enough to run software a random government worker needs to do his job

 

[Juventas]

Forgive me, but I'm missing some basic information here. Are these x86-64? What instruction set extensions? Do they use Intel sockets? Intel PCH?

 

[TheLostSwede]

Forgive me, but I'm missing some basic information here. Are these x86-64? What instruction set extensions? Do they use Intel sockets? Intel PCH?

See

Loongson - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Not socketed, soldered down chips. Custom architecture.

 

[Juventas]

See

Loongson - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Not socketed, soldered down chips. Custom architecture.

Okay MIPS64, not x86-64. A bit of an apple and oranges comparison to Intel then.

For a moment I got excited of the return of multiple CPU vendors sharing motherboards à la Cyrix and VIA.

 

[phanbuey]

Okay MIPS64, not x86-64. A bit of an apple and oranges comparison to Intel then.

For a moment I got excited of the return of multiple CPU vendors sharing motherboards à la Cyrix and VIA.

Very much -- but it's a good propaganda piece so that none of the executives mysteriously vanish. Shows progress.

 

[R-T-B]

Kind of impressive considering that they are a relatively new player. However, I would not expect the same meteoric rise in performance and efficiency as we saw with, say, Chinese NAND like the one YMTC makes. CPUs are so much more complex. But, I guess, this will more than satisfy the internal market as far as workhorse office laptops and desktops are concerned. You don’t really NEED much more than a 10100 to run your day to day tasks, really.

They aren't really a new player. I got a first gen Loongson devkit back in the very early 2010s. Back then, it was a single core MIPS32 device w/ 1GB DDR2 + a laptop HDD in a PC the size of a small bible, IIRC. Not terrible impressive even for the time. I still have it somewhere but I think I killed it trying to bios mod it. (My original contract to get it for free was to port some library to gentoo portage for mips, forget what. Man, those compile times...)

They've (they being the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which designs these) come a long way but still are behind after all these years. And most of these years were unimpeded progress. The impact of the sanctions still has yet to be measured.

Longsoon isn't new and has been around for a long time.

Yeah and also, they have a habit of inflating performance specs a bit.

A bit of an apple and oranges comparison to Intel then.

Sorta. Supposedly the x86_64 emulation performance is quite good, like 80% of original speed good, due to use of pretty blatantly ripped off instructions solely for "emulation use only").

I've never tested that figure though.

 

[Fouquin]

For a moment I got excited of the return of multiple CPU vendors sharing motherboards à la Cyrix and VIA.

That dream ended in 2021 because of VIA.

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

And to add.. this is custom RISC chip. Not x86, i.e. - it's like comparing M1 when doing M1 things to x86, great, but that means you have to build out the software ecosystem or use an interpreter.

Yeah looks like a modified MIPS64 ISA with binary translation for x86. I'm assuming these are native benchmarks though, which makes this pretty misleading.

This is important part. I'd like to see x86 emulation performance.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Okay MIPS64, not x86-64. A bit of an apple and oranges comparison to Intel then.

For a moment I got excited of the return of multiple CPU vendors sharing motherboards à la Cyrix and VIA.

More like a MIPS/RISC-V fusion thingie now apparently.

That dream ended in 2021 because of VIA.

Those CPUs might've used the same sockets as some older Intel CPUs, but they weren't pin-to-pin compatible.

 

[lzh]

I'm going to tell you that Asus has already tested it and it seems that 3A6000 can easily reach 3Ghz without upgrading its voltage(not confirmed).let's wait for several days and to see that whether it's ture or not.

 

[Fouquin]

Those CPUs might've used the same sockets as some older Intel CPUs, but they weren't pin-to-pin compatible.

Oh trust me, I know. I own a few. There were some Isaiah based SoC concepts that were LGA2011 pin compatible, but obviously those were prototypes only and nothing that they could have shipped without signing a new license with Intel. Otherwise the last pin-compatible chips were the PGA479 Nanos.

 

[lzh]

It's not that impressive to steal technology. Developing technology it is what is impressive.

IF you tell that ZhaoXin uses VIA's technology and HaiGuang uses AMD's technology,that's true;but obviously this one is made by loongson themselve,from microarchtecture to its owe chip.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

The chinese gov loves to steal technology, soon intel will be done for and thanks to chinese gov for making that to happen.

Be careful, I got in trouble for "discussing politics" on here for making a joke implying such. Just trying to help other avoid my same mistake.

 

[FeelinFroggy]

IF you tell that ZhaoXin uses VIA's technology and HaiGuang uses AMD's technology,that's true;but obviously this one is made by loongson themselve,from microarchtecture to its owe chip.

The IP theft is much bigger than stealing CPU architecture. When Ford starting building automobiles, it was not the car that changed the world. It was how he built it.

 

[lzh]

The IP theft is much bigger than stealing CPU architecture. When Ford starting building automobiles, it was not the car that changed the world. It was how he built it.

Actually,HaiGuang(HYGON)had bought the Zen 1 IP from AMD.They have to paid for it,millons of dollars every year.

 

[lzh]

Actually,HaiGuang(HYGON)had bought the Zen 1 IP from AMD.They have to paid for it,millons of dollars every year.

Additionally,HYGON seems published their "4th" chip. Some suggested that they attained the certification of using the Zen 2 structure to compare against the Loongson. In contrast,all of the IPs used by 3A6000 were made by loongson themselve.

 

[FeelinFroggy]

Additionally,HYGON seems published their "4th" chip. Some suggested that they attained the certification of using the Zen 2 structure to compare against the Loongson. In contrast,all of the IPs used by 3A6000 were made by loongson themselve.

I'll say it again, the IP theft is much bigger than the CPU architecture. It's the entire product realization process for everything manufactured in China. How things are manufactured, the equipment used, testing, etc.

Here is a real world analogy, anyone with an internet connection can get online and learn how nuclear weapons work. But despite the fact that everyone has the access to the information that makes them work, there are only a few countries in the world that can actually build one.

It's the building part that is hard, not the designs.

 

[Prima.Vera]

How about the x86 license ??

 

[lzh]

I'll say it again, the IP theft is much bigger than the CPU architecture. It's the entire product realization process for everything manufactured in China. How things are manufactured, the equipment used, testing, etc.

Here is a real world analogy, anyone with an internet connection can get online and learn how nuclear weapons work. But despite the fact that everyone has the access to the information that makes them work, there are only a few countries in the world that can actually build one.

It's the building part that is hard, not the designs.

OK,I finally understand you.How they made these chips is still mystery.But it's believed that they still depends on the ASML's machines to process their chips,so they may have some these machines for researching.It's unknown about whether they steal the technology about the procedure.BUT,Obviously they have refered something from it.
They can achieve 7nm process by their own,but it's clear and undoubt that they can't make their own lithography machine(they can make it,but just for 45nm process) and some important raw.They may attain it in an illegal way.

 

[lzh]

How about the x86 license ??

ZhaoXin's one is from VIA.They purchased VIA and gained its X86 license and IP core. HYGON's one is from AMD.They built a company to receive licence,though a complicate chain to achieve it.As a result,HYGON have to admit their half revenue to AMD,so its chip is expensive and only for servicer.

 

[Prima.Vera]

ZhaoXin's one is from VIA.They purchased VIA and gained its X86 license and IP core. HYGON's one is from AMD.They built a company to receive licence,though a complicate chain to achieve it.As a result,HYGON have to admit their half revenue to AMD,so its chip is expensive and only for servicer.

This could be true, but then again, Loongson is a different company from those 2. Unless there is some kind of merge, I think the x86 is not purchasable...

 

[lzh]

This could be true, but then again, Loongson is a different company from those 2. Unless there is some kind of merge, I think the x86 is not purchasable...

Loongson uses Loongarch.They tried to run exe. on their chip with LATX and run Android programs with LATA.