News Loongson: Next-Generation 48-Core Chinese CPU Matches Intel's Tiger Lake

[Admin]

Loongson publishes test results of its quad-core 3A6000 processor at 2.50 GHz.

Loongson: Next-Generation 48-Core Chinese CPU Matches Intel's Tiger Lake : Read more

 

[ekio]

It matches tiger lake...?


You really think people are learning the marketing nickname of each generation?
Just say gen 11000 or something, you know, like the real product name.

 

[bit_user]

Based on the relevant test results, the overall performance of the Loongson 3A6000 processor is comparable to that of Intel's 10th generation Core quad-core processor launched in 2020

That would be either Ice Lake (mobile) or Comet Lake (desktop). Not Tiger Lake (Gen 11, mobile). BTW, Ice Lake launched at the end of 2019.

SPEC discontinued its SPEC 2006 CPU benchmark in 2018, making it impossible to compare Loonson's performance numbers to independently obtained results approved by SPEC.

That might be true for official figures, but there's plenty of SPEC2006 data out there, if you look. Anandtech continued using it through 2020. These are single-threaded:

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4
​

So, their CPU's int score of 43.1 puts it just below Tiger Lake @ 15 W, but the fp score of 54.6 falls well short of Tiger Lake and lands just below Ryzen 2700X.

 

[bit_user]

It matches tiger lake...?

You really think people are learning the marketing nickname of each generation?
Just say gen 11000 or something, you know, like the real product name.

Tiger Lake is the codename of Intel's Gen 11 mobile CPUs that were at the cutting-edge from late 2020 to late 2021 (?).

A lot of regular readers of Toms would know that, so I think it's okay to put in the headline and a lot less awkward than "Intel's 11th Gen Mobile CPUs". If you want the details, you could read the article. Unfortunately, the article references Gen 10, which should be Ice Lake.

 

[eric79xxl]

Even if you just go by the older test program results, this is the closest China (or Russia) has been to matching Intel or AMD performance.... Very worrisome.
It'd be a shame if something happened to their fab and R&D facilities.

 

[bit_user]

Even if you just go by the older test program results, this is the closest China (or Russia) has been to matching Intel or AMD performance.... Very worrisome.

Whether it's worrisome is a matter of geopolitics and global trade policy. We might guess how those will play out, but we don't know for certain. I try to set that stuff aside and just look at these developments from a technical standpoint.

I've even chatted a little with a software developer working on supporting the platform, and they're not much different than us. I think it helps to remember that.

 

[artk2219]

Whether it's worrisome is a matter of geopolitics and global trade policy. We might guess how those will play out, but we don't know for certain. I try to set that stuff aside and just look at these developments from a technical standpoint.

I've even chatted a little with a software developer working on supporting the platform, and they're not much different than us. I think it helps to remember that.

Not different at all, governments are not often representative of their people. At the end of the day we all basically want the same things, shelter, food, clothing, and the ability to support and keep those things for ourselves and others we are close to. Everything else is basically icing on top. People tend to gravitate towards tribalism because its typically easier to "blame the other guy" than to take a step back and look at the bigger picture to realize we're all in this crap together.

 

[Geef]

Not different at all, governments are not often representative of their people. At the end of the day we all basically want the same things, shelter, food, clothing, and the ability to support and keep those things for ourselves and others we are close to.

Only difference is I have a feeling the hardware will have strange things added. Not sure what. Maybe it forces your PC's startup screen to have a pic of Xi Jinping or something?

 

[bit_user]

Only difference is I have a feeling the hardware will have strange things added. Not sure what.

To me, the obvious thing would be if it only allows signed microcode, BIOS, and boot images, which must be signed by a government entity. That lets them ensure backdoors or spyware is in place and can't be circumvented.

People talk about backdoors in the hardware, but if you just limit the software & firmware to government-approved releases, then there don't even need to be any backdoors in the hardware itself. In fact, you don't really even need to design a custom CPU, either (except for maybe the microcode-signing part) and you sure don't need a custom ISA. I think the custom ISA is really just about ensuring nobody else controls what they want to do with the platform.

BTW, a good argument not to put backdoors in the hardware itself is if a foreign adversary (or just your run-of-the-mill cybercriminal) finds it, then you're stuck with millions or billions of vulnerable machines in the wild. Whereas, if you do the backdoors in software and one of them is compromised, you can just issue a software update to close it and add a different one in its place.

 

[bit_user]

At the end of the day we all basically want the same things, shelter, food, clothing, and the ability to support and keep those things for ourselves and others we are close to.

No, we didn't discuss anything like that. They just seemed like a reasonable developer, capable of seeing things from different perspectives.

Their take on friction between some of the other the Loongson developers and the projects they were trying to upstream their patches to was that a lot of it was due to communication problems and language issues. I suggested they might hire some liaisons to help smooth over some of these interactions, as they didn't have anyone tasked with that sort of thing.

Everything else is basically icing on top. People tend to gravitate towards tribalism because its typically easier to "blame the other guy" than to take a step back and look at the bigger picture to realize we're all in this crap together.

The problem for a project maintainer is that you get these patches of varying quality and levels of documentation that seem to come out of nowhere, from people without a track record, and with no or minimal prior discussion on the mailing list. This creates stress for the maintainer, who already has enough on their plate and it creates stress for the submitter, who's under pressure to get the patches accepted and doesn't understand why they're getting so much pushback. As we all know, stressful situations rarely bring out the best in people.

Also, it didn't help that some of the architecture (mostly system architecture rather than ISA, as far as I understand) was forked off of MIPS, yet they insisted it's not MIPS. From a maintainer's perspective, the distinction seems artificial and unnecessary. So, it just creates yet another point of friction.

 

[nookoool]

This might be a fun hobbyist machine outside of China if they can get the board+cpu for a reasonable price and have a english version of a loongson opitimize linux

 

[bit_user]

This might be a fun hobbyist machine outside of China if they can get the board+cpu for a reasonable price and have a english version of a loongson opitimize linux

Probably rather expensive for a hobbyist machine, but if you're the sort that likes tinkering with alternative CPU architectures, then I could definitely see that. Apart from ARM and RISC-V, I think the only other ISA out there with modern CPUs being built and good Linux support is POWER (you can buy POWER workstations from Raptor Computing, BTW).

Does anyone know what Linux distros are popular inside China? The reason I ask is that the only things you'd need English versions of would be the installer and package manager. While they might have their own installer, they should probably use some standard form of packages, in which case you can just use a standard package manager that has English translations. All of the normal software in a Linux distro will have English translations for it.

Another area where you could hit a snag using it outside of China is accessing the package repos. I would assume they're accessible from the outside, but maybe not or they might require some kind of access token.

 

[nookoool]

Probably rather expensive for a hobbyist machine, but if you're the sort that likes tinkering with alternative CPU architectures, then I could definitely see that. Apart from ARM and RISC-V, I think the only other ISA out there with modern CPUs being built and good Linux support is POWER (you can buy POWER workstations from Raptor Computing, BTW).

Does anyone know what Linux distros are popular inside China? The reason I ask is that the only things you'd need English versions of would be the installer and package manager. While they might have their own installer, they should probably use some standard form of packages, in which case you can just use a standard package manager that has English translations. All of the normal software in a Linux distro will have English translations for it.

Another area where you could hit a snag using it outside of China is accessing the package repos. I would assume they're accessible from the outside, but maybe not or they might require some kind of access token.

Don't know if they are used, but there are 3a5000 boards (i assume it comes w a cpu) going for 400ish on aliexpress. Not cheap for its performance profile but not out of reach.

I believe they are using loongnix, uos, deepin, kylin. I remember a youtuber mentioning that he had to buy a uos license rather than use the open source deepin to get proper drivers for this 3a4000 a few years back. Not sure how that type of support is propagated into the general linux ecosystem.

Also packages would need to be recompiled/(recoded?) by the community to be loongson compatible or one would have to compile locally and pray.

 

[bit_user]

Also packages would need to be recompiled/(recoded?) by the community to be loongson compatible or one would have to compile locally and pray.

I'm sure at least 95% of packages would compile and run without a hitch. Maybe even higher. The reason being that I'm sure the PowerPC, MIPS, ARM, RISC-V, etc. distros did a lot to address codepaths that are x86-only (i.e. using assembly language or platform-specific intrinsic functions).

Furthermore, the LoongArch developers should've done the work to port all of the key software (compilers, web browsers, desktop environments, etc.) and upstream the changes needed for most to build and run on LoongArch.

If I were going to jump to an emerging ISA, it would be RISC-V. However, if you have reason to take interest in LoongArch, I expect you'll find the going isn't too rough.