As you can imagine, with the persecution of Donald Trump’s administration, and the continuation of the vast majority of restrictions when Joe Biden came to power, China was forced to look inwards, that is, to develop technological alternatives so as not to have to depend on the which is done outside.
Where it is clear, we have to include processors, both for smartphones and for PCs, whether they are desktop or portable. Well, it seems that giant China already has a very interesting processor in the form of the Loongson 3A5000, a quad-core CPU capable of reaching 2.3~2.5GHz.
It is a component that includes 4 ALUs (Logical Arithmetic Units), and two 256-bit ‘vector’ units for each core. It is one of China’s first major technological efforts in this field, which apparently can already rival the performance of AMD’s first Ryzen processors.
Beware Intel and AMD!? China already has a very interesting processor
So the announcement was made last Friday! Make way for a new Loongson processor, which in turn supports two DDR4-3200 RAM memory controllers, plus a dedicated encryption module. In addition, it also has four HyperTransport 3.0 SMP controllers, which, of course, allows the assembly of multiple Loongsoon processors in a single machine.
In other words, exactly what Intel does with Xeon processors, and AMD does with Epyc processors.
What makes this processor something very interesting are not its technical specifications.
The Loongon 3A5000 uses an ISA (instruction set architecture) called LoongArch, which in turn is very similar to the famous x86 or ARM instruction sets. However, to avoid technology licensing, it was done from scratch.
After all, LoongArch has nearly 2000 proprietary instructions and extensions, for binary, vector, and even virtualization conversion. Interestingly, there is even backwards compatibility with the old MIPS64 processors from this range.
However, this means that LoongArch is 10~20% more efficient! This allows the 3A5000 to be 50% faster than its predecessor, the 3A4000. At the same time it consumes 30% less electricity.
In short, although it’s complicated to compare this processor to what AMD and Intel offer on the market. Everything indicates that the performance is very similar to AMD’s first Ryzen, or sixth generation of Intel Core processors. This is interesting, because this processor just presented isn’t even the top of the range! Since we already have a 16-core version on the way called the 3C5000.
It is undeniable that China is starting to impress in the field of processor development and production. But will all this have a strong impact on the market?
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