11 ms·

Loongson 3A6000: A Star Among Chinese CPUs

98 points by rguiscard 3y ago

tuananh 3y ago
At this rate, China is gonna be able to catch up with Intel/AMD soon?
- TimeBearingDown 3y ago
  See excellent article. The 3A6000 is Loongson’s best and newest and performs between the level of Zen (GloFo 14-12nm) and Zen 2 (TSMC 7nm) but limited to four cores. A lot depends on the cost to produce that chip, whether Loongson can scale below 14-12nm they’re using currently (EUV without ASML?), and what development resources Loongson can deploy for their next microarchitecture revisions, which aren’t discussed here.
  - RetroTechie 3y ago
    > The 3A6000 is Loongson’s best and newest and performs between the level of Zen (GloFo 14-12nm) and Zen 2 (TSMC 7nm) but limited to four cores. Which is fine. For most applications, it's the order of magnitude of performance that matters. Not +10..30% or say, Zen 3 vs. Zen 2 (although gamers & AMD/Intel execs will argue otherwise). Machines with >10y old cpu's are still perfectly useable for (most) everyday tasks, as long as the software support is there. Especially when coupled with enough RAM, decent gpu, SSD etc. On the way from "pointless museum piece" to "latest & greatest", this cpu is 9/10s there.
    - klabb3 3y ago
      > it's the order of magnitude of performance that matters Finally a sound voice in this merry go round of one-upping. Totally agree. The funny thing is, if people paid half as much attention to optimizing the bloat crap they build, instead of drooling over 10% cpu gains, you’d see a much bigger improvements. Obviously it depends on the domain, but everything I’ve come across (except core tech like SQLite etc) have huge overhead in both memory and cpu that could easily be optimized if someone paid attention. Like the json parsing issue with gta online, that’s a perfect yet egregious example of software practices today.
    - lostmsu 3y ago
      I think you missed the "limited to 4 cores" part. Zen 2 has up to 64, which considering it is also slower per core makes it 20 times slower. If like me you count 2x as order of magnitude, that's 4+ orders of magnitude away.
      - hulitu 3y ago
        > Zen 2 has up to 64, 64 is _very expensive_.
        lostmsu 3y ago
        Was. Now you can get it off eBay for $2000
- throwaway4good 3y ago
  They are certainly accelerating. I think the consensus is that it is within fabrication there is a "chokepoint". In terms of design, China has world class companies. However in terms of fabrication and especially semiconductor manufacturing equipment, they are still somewhat behind. Also x86 is very sticky - it is going to take them a decade to get rid of that.
  - morkalork 3y ago
    A decade or two isn't a long time, politically.
  - luyu_wu 3y ago
    Interestingly, they've got binary translators for both ARM and x86 which were demoed in Geekerwan's video. Apparently, they're apparently donating a compilation farm for a Debian repository. Definetly interesting to see how Lithography will develop independently in China, and if it will ever pass the EUV chokepoint.
  - xgk 3y ago
    > In terms of design, China has world class companies. And not just companies. This is currently the world's top open-source RISC-V development https://github.com/OpenXiangShan https://github.com/OpenXiangShan coming from the Chinese Academy of Science. (Whether China will remain investing in RISC-V, given that the US government has started to pressure US RISC-V development to limit their involvement with China is another question.)
klelatti 3y ago
MIPS ISA? Is this a problem in practice in 2024?
- rbanffy 3y ago
  Not really. As long as there are compilers.
  - tibbydudeza 3y ago
    They just use GCC and LLVM.
synergy20 3y ago
used to be MIPS based, is it still the case, could not find the info at that page.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  The chip uses LoongSon's own "LoongArch" ISA. They moved away from MIPS supposedly because of fears of licensing issues. It is very much like the last revision of MIPS but modernised a bit: No more branch delay slot. No HI/LO registers. The arithmetic ops that trapped on overflow are also gone. There are published docs only for the scalar ISA subset: https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/README-EN.html https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/README-EN... Chips and Cheese has an analysis of the "LSX" and "LASX" SIMD sets. LSX is very much like MIPS's MSA. LASX is extended to 256 bits: https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/02/26/loongsons-lsx-and-lasx-vector-extensions/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/02/26/loongsons-lsx-and-lasx...
- fweimer 3y ago
  The ISA manual is here: https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch-Vol1-EN.html https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch...
sudhirj 3y ago
What’s the game theory-ish take on this? Isn’t cutting off China’s access to chips counter productive in the long run, because of course they’re going to throw the country behind being self sufficient in this regard. Is the process where cutting off an opponent’s access to a resource causing them to become more powerful a thing?
- throwaway4good 3y ago
  I am fairly convinced now that in about ten years time, the tech war will be seen as a huge strategic blunder.
  - quantum_state 3y ago
    The blunder would be guaranteed if China spends a small fraction of the time and effort thinking out of box to look into other computing paradigms ... and relaxing some of the unnecessary limitation on individual rights, private properties, etc.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    By its proponents? It's already apparent to many. The current trade war started already over half a decade ago under Trump.
    - throwaway4good 3y ago
      Yes. I think in the US politics "blob" eg. the sanctions against Huawei are still seen as enormously succesful in the sense that they did huge economic damage on the company without China being able to retribute directly. However today Huawei mass-produces a modern high-end phone and if you open that phone, none of the components inside are produced by western companies, everything is Chinese. That is really remarkable. And it is not going to stop with a phone.
      - MaxPock 3y ago
        Perfect case of winning the battle and losing the war .
consumer451 3y ago
Can anyone with more hardware insight tell me if the brunt of this story is actually true, and how related to this chip AMD's actions were? > How a Big U.S. Chip Maker Gave China the ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ > Advanced Micro Devices revived its fortunes through the deal, and sparked a national-security battle https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tried-to-stop-china-acquiring-world-class-chips-china-got-them-anyway-11561646798 https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tried-to-stop-china-acquiri... https://archive.vn/V7cZq https://archive.vn/V7cZq
- luyu_wu 3y ago
  Different company! Loongson runs their own MIPS based ISA which is self-developed. IIRC that company is called Zhaoxin, which has had mild success getting ~Zen 2 performance domestically. I'm not to sure why WSJ is citing that as a 'national security issue', everything related to China seems to be called that now.
  - arnavpraneet 3y ago
    Yeah it's American vs Chinese empire stuff at this point. New cold war and all that.
    - VelesDude 3y ago
      It is funny, you could take articles from the 1980's about Japan taking over Americas grip on technology, swap Japan to China and they would read almost the same to what we are seeing today. Yes, there are some different key details but the parallels on the messaging is neat to see.
  - satellite2 3y ago
    It's because of last year tensions around Taiwan and TSMC. Reliance on this company hit an all time high and tensions showed that it was strategically risky. So both side have been pushing local foundries projects via grants and other incentives.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
luyu_wu 3y ago
Interesting to me because this is very likely to drive Linux support and usage in Mainland China! Windows is unlikely to ever support LoongArch. Had a very enlightening discussion with the authors as well, kudos to them for an amazing article!
tibbydudeza 3y ago
It seems Linux is going to win the desktop wars in China. Windows is clearly never going to be ported to this oddball MIPS architecture so their stack will all be dependence on open source but sadly they will not return the favor by releasing their source or maybe my perception of China open source is biased.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  The CPU does supposedly have instruction set extensions for faster execution of binary code translated from x86, ARM and RISC-V. They think that it would be sufficient for running Windows/x86 apps at near-native speed in QEMU. No ISA spec has been published. A few research articles are available from Chinese universities but most are only available in Chinese.
- cl91 3y ago
  > not return the favor by releasing their source That's not quite true and your bias is showing. The company behind Loongarch is reasonably friendly to FOSS and most of their LA64 changes (to Linux, llvm, binutils, gcc, etc) are upstreamed in a timely fashion. As for the chipset, kernel drivers are all open source although not all have been accepted upstream. I have personally been maintaining the out-of-tree Linux drm driver for their onboard gpu chip and it's available on github https://github.com/cl91/linux/tree/gsgpu-devel https://github.com/cl91/linux/tree/gsgpu-devel. If you have a barebone 3A6000+7A2000 setup, as far as I know the only closed source component needed is their userspace mesa driver for the onboard gpu.
  - arnavpraneet 3y ago
    +1 while I don't have any idea this deep in hardware engineering, in normal appdev Chinese open source contributions are well known and there's a whole class of up and coming apps which are great, just not internationalized well enough for others to use yet
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  >or maybe my perception of China open source is biased. FWIW The Chinese government seems to be trying to encourage open source, they even run their own equivalent of github called gitee. https://gitee.com/explore https://gitee.com/explore
sylware 3y ago
x86_64? Seriously? I would understand if that would be for legacy support, like x86_64 decoded to risc-v.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  The article missed out on context. The chip runs LoongSon's own "LoongArch" ISA which they had developed out of MIPS'. Chips and Cheeses test programs are written in that ISA. There are other articles on the site that tell more about it. LoongSon does however supposedly have a instruction set extension for running binary-translated x86 code faster (and ARM and RISC-V), but they have not published much about it.
  - sylware 3y ago
    Since RISC-V has also its roots in mips, maybe loongson should move to RISC-V for good with a x86/arm hardware translater. All that to run binary distributed x86 apps...
    - Findecanor 3y ago
      Today I agree that it would make much sense for LoongSon to jump on the RISC-V bandwagon. However, designing a CPU takes years. Back when they transitioned from MIPS to LoongArch, RISC-V wasn't mature enough to have all the functionality that their MIPS cores did. There was no ratified Bitmanip extension and it was unclear what kind of vector extension that it would get.
    - luyu_wu 3y ago
      Unfortunately, RISCV is really a mess right now, the Vector extensions are horrible. Amusingly, LoongArch has better Linux support than RISCV right now too... Would've definetly been nice to see them adopt RISCV though. ISAs are fragmented enough as is.
      - camel-cdr 3y ago
        > the Vector extensions are horrible How so?
mysteria 3y ago
How much do these CPUs cost? There'll be international buyers if they can beat Intel and AMD in terms of price to performance ratio, even if the chips are slower and consume more power. For general home and business computing Zen 1 performance is more than adequate especially since these are designed for Linux.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  I guess it's not easy to even get your hands on it. Likely pretty low volume. What kills it for the home and small business use is that it's MIPS. Just not worth saving 50 or so dollars of AMD / Intel premium for this trouble. As I understand, this CPU doesn't have an iGPU which makes it an even worse deal.
  - VelesDude 3y ago
    I have been trying to get my hands on one of these (in Australia) for about 2 months now but no luck. Tempted to give Ali Express a try on this. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006181125200.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006181125200.html
  - luyu_wu 3y ago
    2 minor gripes! 1. Not MIPS, LoongISA, there are working Binary translators already, and they're commobly used in government office work! 2. They do have an iGPU, refer to Geekerwan's video! Otherwise agree though, they're unlikely to go international at this point!
amai 3y ago
Are there any comparable CPUs made in Europe?

98 points by rguiscard 3y ago

tuananh 3y ago

At this rate, China is gonna be able to catch up with Intel/AMD soon?

TimeBearingDown 3y ago
See excellent article. The 3A6000 is Loongson’s best and newest and performs between the level of Zen (GloFo 14-12nm) and Zen 2 (TSMC 7nm) but limited to four cores. A lot depends on the cost to produce that chip, whether Loongson can scale below 14-12nm they’re using currently (EUV without ASML?), and what development resources Loongson can deploy for their next microarchitecture revisions, which aren’t discussed here.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  > The 3A6000 is Loongson’s best and newest and performs between the level of Zen (GloFo 14-12nm) and Zen 2 (TSMC 7nm) but limited to four cores. Which is fine. For most applications, it's the order of magnitude of performance that matters. Not +10..30% or say, Zen 3 vs. Zen 2 (although gamers & AMD/Intel execs will argue otherwise). Machines with >10y old cpu's are still perfectly useable for (most) everyday tasks, as long as the software support is there. Especially when coupled with enough RAM, decent gpu, SSD etc. On the way from "pointless museum piece" to "latest & greatest", this cpu is 9/10s there.
  - klabb3 3y ago
    > it's the order of magnitude of performance that matters Finally a sound voice in this merry go round of one-upping. Totally agree. The funny thing is, if people paid half as much attention to optimizing the bloat crap they build, instead of drooling over 10% cpu gains, you’d see a much bigger improvements. Obviously it depends on the domain, but everything I’ve come across (except core tech like SQLite etc) have huge overhead in both memory and cpu that could easily be optimized if someone paid attention. Like the json parsing issue with gta online, that’s a perfect yet egregious example of software practices today.
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    I think you missed the "limited to 4 cores" part. Zen 2 has up to 64, which considering it is also slower per core makes it 20 times slower. If like me you count 2x as order of magnitude, that's 4+ orders of magnitude away.
    - hulitu 3y ago
      > Zen 2 has up to 64, 64 is _very expensive_.
      - lostmsu 3y ago
        Was. Now you can get it off eBay for $2000
throwaway4good 3y ago
They are certainly accelerating. I think the consensus is that it is within fabrication there is a "chokepoint". In terms of design, China has world class companies. However in terms of fabrication and especially semiconductor manufacturing equipment, they are still somewhat behind. Also x86 is very sticky - it is going to take them a decade to get rid of that.
- morkalork 3y ago
  A decade or two isn't a long time, politically.
- luyu_wu 3y ago
  Interestingly, they've got binary translators for both ARM and x86 which were demoed in Geekerwan's video. Apparently, they're apparently donating a compilation farm for a Debian repository. Definetly interesting to see how Lithography will develop independently in China, and if it will ever pass the EUV chokepoint.
- xgk 3y ago
  > In terms of design, China has world class companies. And not just companies. This is currently the world's top open-source RISC-V development https://github.com/OpenXiangShan https://github.com/OpenXiangShan coming from the Chinese Academy of Science. (Whether China will remain investing in RISC-V, given that the US government has started to pressure US RISC-V development to limit their involvement with China is another question.)

klelatti 3y ago

MIPS ISA? Is this a problem in practice in 2024?

rbanffy 3y ago
Not really. As long as there are compilers.
- tibbydudeza 3y ago
  They just use GCC and LLVM.

synergy20 3y ago

used to be MIPS based, is it still the case, could not find the info at that page.

Findecanor 3y ago
The chip uses LoongSon's own "LoongArch" ISA. They moved away from MIPS supposedly because of fears of licensing issues. It is very much like the last revision of MIPS but modernised a bit: No more branch delay slot. No HI/LO registers. The arithmetic ops that trapped on overflow are also gone. There are published docs only for the scalar ISA subset: https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/README-EN.html https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/README-EN... Chips and Cheese has an analysis of the "LSX" and "LASX" SIMD sets. LSX is very much like MIPS's MSA. LASX is extended to 256 bits: https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/02/26/loongsons-lsx-and-lasx-vector-extensions/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/02/26/loongsons-lsx-and-lasx...
fweimer 3y ago
The ISA manual is here: https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch-Vol1-EN.html https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch...

sudhirj 3y ago

What’s the game theory-ish take on this? Isn’t cutting off China’s access to chips counter productive in the long run, because of course they’re going to throw the country behind being self sufficient in this regard. Is the process where cutting off an opponent’s access to a resource causing them to become more powerful a thing?

throwaway4good 3y ago
I am fairly convinced now that in about ten years time, the tech war will be seen as a huge strategic blunder.
- quantum_state 3y ago
  The blunder would be guaranteed if China spends a small fraction of the time and effort thinking out of box to look into other computing paradigms ... and relaxing some of the unnecessary limitation on individual rights, private properties, etc.
- pphysch 3y ago
  By its proponents? It's already apparent to many. The current trade war started already over half a decade ago under Trump.
  - throwaway4good 3y ago
    Yes. I think in the US politics "blob" eg. the sanctions against Huawei are still seen as enormously succesful in the sense that they did huge economic damage on the company without China being able to retribute directly. However today Huawei mass-produces a modern high-end phone and if you open that phone, none of the components inside are produced by western companies, everything is Chinese. That is really remarkable. And it is not going to stop with a phone.
    - MaxPock 3y ago
      Perfect case of winning the battle and losing the war .

consumer451 3y ago

Can anyone with more hardware insight tell me if the brunt of this story is actually true, and how related to this chip AMD's actions were? > How a Big U.S. Chip Maker Gave China the ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ > Advanced Micro Devices revived its fortunes through the deal, and sparked a national-security battle https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tried-to-stop-china-acquiring-world-class-chips-china-got-them-anyway-11561646798 https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tried-to-stop-china-acquiri... https://archive.vn/V7cZq https://archive.vn/V7cZq

luyu_wu 3y ago
Different company! Loongson runs their own MIPS based ISA which is self-developed. IIRC that company is called Zhaoxin, which has had mild success getting ~Zen 2 performance domestically. I'm not to sure why WSJ is citing that as a 'national security issue', everything related to China seems to be called that now.
- arnavpraneet 3y ago
  Yeah it's American vs Chinese empire stuff at this point. New cold war and all that.
  - VelesDude 3y ago
    It is funny, you could take articles from the 1980's about Japan taking over Americas grip on technology, swap Japan to China and they would read almost the same to what we are seeing today. Yes, there are some different key details but the parallels on the messaging is neat to see.
- satellite2 3y ago
  It's because of last year tensions around Taiwan and TSMC. Reliance on this company hit an all time high and tensions showed that it was strategically risky. So both side have been pushing local foundries projects via grants and other incentives.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

luyu_wu 3y ago

Interesting to me because this is very likely to drive Linux support and usage in Mainland China! Windows is unlikely to ever support LoongArch. Had a very enlightening discussion with the authors as well, kudos to them for an amazing article!

tibbydudeza 3y ago

It seems Linux is going to win the desktop wars in China. Windows is clearly never going to be ported to this oddball MIPS architecture so their stack will all be dependence on open source but sadly they will not return the favor by releasing their source or maybe my perception of China open source is biased.

Findecanor 3y ago
The CPU does supposedly have instruction set extensions for faster execution of binary code translated from x86, ARM and RISC-V. They think that it would be sufficient for running Windows/x86 apps at near-native speed in QEMU. No ISA spec has been published. A few research articles are available from Chinese universities but most are only available in Chinese.
cl91 3y ago
> not return the favor by releasing their source That's not quite true and your bias is showing. The company behind Loongarch is reasonably friendly to FOSS and most of their LA64 changes (to Linux, llvm, binutils, gcc, etc) are upstreamed in a timely fashion. As for the chipset, kernel drivers are all open source although not all have been accepted upstream. I have personally been maintaining the out-of-tree Linux drm driver for their onboard gpu chip and it's available on github https://github.com/cl91/linux/tree/gsgpu-devel https://github.com/cl91/linux/tree/gsgpu-devel. If you have a barebone 3A6000+7A2000 setup, as far as I know the only closed source component needed is their userspace mesa driver for the onboard gpu.
- arnavpraneet 3y ago
  +1 while I don't have any idea this deep in hardware engineering, in normal appdev Chinese open source contributions are well known and there's a whole class of up and coming apps which are great, just not internationalized well enough for others to use yet
RobotToaster 3y ago
>or maybe my perception of China open source is biased. FWIW The Chinese government seems to be trying to encourage open source, they even run their own equivalent of github called gitee. https://gitee.com/explore https://gitee.com/explore

sylware 3y ago

x86_64? Seriously? I would understand if that would be for legacy support, like x86_64 decoded to risc-v.

Findecanor 3y ago
The article missed out on context. The chip runs LoongSon's own "LoongArch" ISA which they had developed out of MIPS'. Chips and Cheeses test programs are written in that ISA. There are other articles on the site that tell more about it. LoongSon does however supposedly have a instruction set extension for running binary-translated x86 code faster (and ARM and RISC-V), but they have not published much about it.
- sylware 3y ago
  Since RISC-V has also its roots in mips, maybe loongson should move to RISC-V for good with a x86/arm hardware translater. All that to run binary distributed x86 apps...
  - Findecanor 3y ago
    Today I agree that it would make much sense for LoongSon to jump on the RISC-V bandwagon. However, designing a CPU takes years. Back when they transitioned from MIPS to LoongArch, RISC-V wasn't mature enough to have all the functionality that their MIPS cores did. There was no ratified Bitmanip extension and it was unclear what kind of vector extension that it would get.
  - luyu_wu 3y ago
    Unfortunately, RISCV is really a mess right now, the Vector extensions are horrible. Amusingly, LoongArch has better Linux support than RISCV right now too... Would've definetly been nice to see them adopt RISCV though. ISAs are fragmented enough as is.
    - camel-cdr 3y ago
      > the Vector extensions are horrible How so?

mysteria 3y ago

How much do these CPUs cost? There'll be international buyers if they can beat Intel and AMD in terms of price to performance ratio, even if the chips are slower and consume more power. For general home and business computing Zen 1 performance is more than adequate especially since these are designed for Linux.

The_Colonel 3y ago
I guess it's not easy to even get your hands on it. Likely pretty low volume. What kills it for the home and small business use is that it's MIPS. Just not worth saving 50 or so dollars of AMD / Intel premium for this trouble. As I understand, this CPU doesn't have an iGPU which makes it an even worse deal.
- VelesDude 3y ago
  I have been trying to get my hands on one of these (in Australia) for about 2 months now but no luck. Tempted to give Ali Express a try on this. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006181125200.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006181125200.html
- luyu_wu 3y ago
  2 minor gripes! 1. Not MIPS, LoongISA, there are working Binary translators already, and they're commobly used in government office work! 2. They do have an iGPU, refer to Geekerwan's video! Otherwise agree though, they're unlikely to go international at this point!

amai 3y ago

Are there any comparable CPUs made in Europe?