Under the Loongson brand, the 3D5000 processor was announced – the first 32-core CPU of the brand. These are two 16-core server 3C5000, placed on the same substrate. The processor will not be delivered to Russia – according to the decision of the Chinese authorities, Russians, as well as residents of other countries, access to all Loongson developments is closed.
The Chinese company Loongson has announced a new 3D5000 processor with an unprecedented number of cores for the company, writes Tom's Hardware portal. This CPU contains 32 cores, whereas previously the company produced only a maximum of 16-core solutions.
In fact, the new 3D5000 can also be considered 16-core. To double the number of cores in this processor, the Chinese had to go to a trick, because Loongson does not yet have technologies that allow producing 32-core CPUs without the use of Chinese ingenuity.
The 3D5000 is a chiplet CPU. It has one substrate, but there are two processors inside it. The Chinese simply placed two 16-core 3C5000 on a single substrate and eventually achieved the result they needed.
The 3C5000 is a server processor, which first became known in April 2021, when the premiere of the custom 4-core chip 3A5000 took place. It is produced according to 12-nanometer standards – production began in 2022.
Thus, the scope of the new 3D5000 is gradually emerging. But we will have to wait for the start of its production for quite a long time – at least until the second half of 2023. There is no more precise start date for the conveyor yet. Test samples will appear in the first half of 2023.
Russia, most likely, will not be able to purchase even a minimum batch of 3D5000. As reported by CNews, the Chinese authorities have imposed a ban on the distribution of Loongson chips outside the PRC.
The original Loongson 3C5000 CPU is capable of operating at a frequency of up to 2.2 GHz and comes with 64 MB of cache memory. It has support for four channels of DDR4-3200 memory with Error Correction Protocol (ECC). It is based on 16 LA464 cores with the LoongArch microarchitecture.
In the new 3D5000, all this, except the clock frequency, is multiplied by two – 32 cores, 128 MB of cache and eight memory channels. According to the developers, the processor, with all its potential capabilities, turned out to be very energy efficient – 170 watts at a frequency of 2.2 GHz and 130 watts at 2 GHz.
Loongson 3D5000 uses the LGA 4129 socket. Up to four such processors can be placed in one server, resulting in a 128-core configuration.
All Loongson processors are currently manufactured by STMicroelectronics, a Swedish contract vendor of microchips. But this is unlikely to last long – the United States is gradually destroying the Chinese IT industry, prohibiting companies from different regions of the world from cooperating with customers from China.
So far, there is hope for the Chinese chip manufacturer SMIC, which in the fall of 2022 mastered the 14-nanometer process technology and is currently studying more modern topologies, albeit by copying them from TSMC – the world's largest contract chip manufacturer with a market share (53.6% of the global market versus 5.6% for SMIC in the first quarter of 2022 – Statista.com ). But the US is trying to destroy SMIC by banning the supply of foreign lithography equipment to China.
The Loongson brand is backed by the Chinese company BLX IC Design Corporation, founded in 2002 by specialists from the Institute of Computer Technology, the Academy of Sciences of China and the Jiangsu Zhongy Group.
From the very beginning, BLX IC Design Corporation decided that it would make processors based on its architecture in order to reduce dependence on Western technologies to zero. This architecture is called LoongArch, and currently its instruction system includes almost 2,000 unique instructions. It also implements instructions for binary conversion (LBT), vector processing (LSX), advanced vector processing (LASX) and virtualization (LVZ).
LoongArch developers claim that their architecture does not violate patents related to x86, ARM, MIPS, RISC-V architectures, etc.
The company creates several processors per year. For example, a month before the premiere of the new 3D5000, a 3A6000 user-level chip was released under the Loongson brand, whose performance was 68% higher compared to the 3A5000, which premiered in April 2021. It has been produced since July 2021 .
In mid-December 2022, the Chinese authorities recognized all Loongson processors, as well as the LoongArch architecture itself, as strategically important developments for China. This was immediately followed by a ban on access to them by Russia and other countries of the world.
