News Chinese chipmaker samples 128 core server CPU with chiplets — Infinity Fabric-like interconnect in Loongson's 3E6000 combines four chips into one

[Admin]

Loongson has announced that samples of its 3C6000, 3D6000, and 3E6000 server chips have been successfully taped out and tested, and that production is on track for Q4 2024 releases.

Chinese chipmaker samples 128 core server CPU with chiplets — Infinity Fabric-like interconnect in Loongson's 3E6000 combines four chips into one : Read more

 

[nookoool]

There is allege smooth demo of Genshin Impact running locally on the 3a6000 from a Loongson employee running via binary translation. Though far from being mainstream in China, Loongson has potential if they can figure out how to mass market it or somehow dwindle access from of wintel.

 

[Thunder64]

Ah yes, good old IP theft.

 

[nookoool]

Ah yes, good old IP theft.

What was stolen?

 

[das_stig]

What was stolen?

Lets be real, Chinese engineers are as good or better than western but for China to have caught up to 10th Gen performance in such a short time ..

1. They developed it from licenced IP, good possibility.
2. Developed inhouse IP, possible but doubtful in such a short time frame.
3. Stole the IP and then developed it, wouldn't be the first time and let's be honest, is probably the true answer.

If these chips ever make it to western market, you can guarantee Intel/AMD and anybody else in the chip business will be taking a very long hard look at them under a microscope and any sign of dodgy dealings will get them banned. I wouldn't even be surprised if the USA and friends just ban them from being used as a "risk to national security"

 

[jeremyj_83]

Lets be real, Chinese engineers are as good or better than western but for China to have caught up to 10th Gen performance in such a short time ..

1. They developed it from licenced IP, good possibility.
2. Developed inhouse IP, possible but doubtful in such a short time frame.
3. Stole the IP and then developed it, wouldn't be the first time and let's be honest, is probably the true answer.

If these chips ever make it to western market, you can guarantee Intel/AMD and anybody else in the chip business will be taking a very long hard look at them under a microscope and any sign of dodgy dealings will get them banned. I wouldn't even be surprised if the USA and friends just ban them from being used as a "risk to national security"

AMD did have a license agreement with a Chinese company for a CPU that was almost identical to Zen 1. They probably took that IP and then smuggled newer Zen CPUs into the country and have cloned them.

 

[Lewinator56]

Lets be real, Chinese engineers are as good or better than western but for China to have caught up to 10th Gen performance in such a short time ..

1. They developed it from licenced IP, good possibility.
2. Developed inhouse IP, possible but doubtful in such a short time frame.
3. Stole the IP and then developed it, wouldn't be the first time and let's be honest, is probably the true answer.

If these chips ever make it to western market, you can guarantee Intel/AMD and anybody else in the chip business will be taking a very long hard look at them under a microscope and any sign of dodgy dealings will get them banned. I wouldn't even be surprised if the USA and friends just ban them from being used as a "risk to national security"

It probably is in house. Remember Huawei led, and still leads the industry in 5G tech, they can't have nicked that IP from the west because.... The west admit they are behind, still, let alone 5 years ago. Chinese engineers do know what they are doing.

Loongson's uArch is pretty different to zen and skylake derivatives, chips and cheese have analysed their CPUs pretty closely and they are different enough to exclude IP theft. Stealing IP for an interconnect that can't work with your uArch is a bit stupid.

Of course the US would ban the CPUs on 'national security' grounds, but they happily let Cisco's swiss cheese equipment run core networks....

To be honest, another competitor in the desktop computing market would be great. It's a shame loongson uses it's own MIPS based ISA as mainstream support would be poor, mind you china is a massive market so maybe developers will release MIPS binaries just as they are now doing with ARM. I guess loongson could pick RISC-V but I assume their ISA is more performant or they would probably have switched given the significant software support for RISC-V. Either way, give it a few years and we may genuinely be picking between X86, ARM, RISC-V and LoongArch for new systems (in the actual free world.... The US will obviously stick to just X86 and ARM by banning RISC-V and LongArch)

 

[Pierce2623]

What was stolen

It probably is in house. Remember Huawei led, and still leads the industry in 5G tech, they can't have nicked that IP from the west because.... The west admit they are behind, still, let alone 5 years ago. Chinese engineers do know what they are doing.

Loongson's uArch is pretty different to zen and skylake derivatives, chips and cheese have analysed their CPUs pretty closely and they are different enough to exclude IP theft. Stealing IP for an interconnect that can't work with your uArch is a bit stupid.

Of course the US would ban the CPUs on 'national security' grounds, but they happily let Cisco's swiss cheese equipment run core networks....

To be honest, another competitor in the desktop computing market would be great. It's a shame loongson uses it's own MIPS based ISA as mainstream support would be poor, mind you china is a massive market so maybe developers will release MIPS binaries just as they are now doing with ARM. I guess loongson could pick RISC-V but I assume their ISA is more performant or they would probably have switched given the significant software support for RISC-V. Either way, give it a few years and we may genuinely be picking between X86, ARM, RISC-V and LoongArch for new systems (in the actual free world.... The US will obviously stick to just X86 and ARM by banning RISC-V and LongArch)

.

Where did you come up with the idea that the US would ban risc-v? That’s ridiculous.

 

[Pierce2623]

Lets be real, Chinese engineers are as good or better than western but for China to have caught up to 10th Gen performance in such a short time ..

1. They developed it from licenced IP, good possibility.
2. Developed inhouse IP, possible but doubtful in such a short time frame.
3. Stole the IP and then developed it, wouldn't be the first time and let's be honest, is probably the true answer.

If these chips ever make it to western market, you can guarantee Intel/AMD and anybody else in the chip business will be taking a very long hard look at them under a microscope and any sign of dodgy dealings will get them banned. I wouldn't even be surprised if the USA and friends just ban them from being used as a "risk to national security"

I actually think #3 is the right answer. This arch is basically very similar to zen1 or zen+.

 

[Lewinator56]

Where did you come up with the idea that the US would ban risc-v? That’s ridiculous.

The US government is probing Chinese use of RISC-V as it's effectively allowing the Chinese to use 'high end western tech'. RISC-V is open source and the holding company based in Switzerland. The US has absolutely no control over it OTHER than stopping US companies contributing to RISC-V and cutting off access to western developments that way. That's an effective ban of RISC-V in the US. Do I see it happening? Probably not, but I wouldn't be surprised if extreme licensing rules for US companies working on RISC-V are introduced.

 

[Lewinator56]

I actually think #3 is the right answer. This arch is basically very similar to zen1 or zen+.

Until you actually look at the block diagrams and analysis and you see it's very different to zen - the execution engine couldn't possibly be any different. It's actually closer to K8, which makes sense as most of the recent loongson cores are revisions and improvements of their older core designs, but it's still vastly different.

Have a look at the chips and cheese articles.

 

[Pierce2623]

Until you actually look at the block diagrams and analysis and you see it's very different to zen - the execution engine couldn't possibly be any different. It's actually closer to K8, which makes sense as most of the recent loongson cores are revisions and improvements of their older core designs, but it's still vastly different.

Have a look at the chips and cheese articles.

The Chips and Cheese articles is exactly where I got the information that it’s close to Zen in layout and IPC.