Since Huawei was sanctioned by the United States in 2019, China's semiconductor industry has begun a new sprint. In order to reduce its dependence on external supply chains, China has made semiconductor self-sufficiency an important goal, and the government has also introduced a series of policies to support domestic chip manufacturing, and Loongson is one of the companies that has benefited.
Recently, Loongson released the latest generation of chip, Loongson 3A5000, which uses a 12nm process, which is close to the 7nm process level in terms of performance, and power consumption has been effectively controlled. This has made people re-recognize Loongson, a Chinese chip brand.
It is reported that the Loongson 3A5000 uses a MIPS architecture, with four 64-bit cores and a main frequency of 2.5GHz. In terms of single-threaded performance, the Loongson 3A5000 surpasses the Intel Core i5-5200U, and is even equivalent to the i7-4750HQ, compared to the previous generation chip Loongson 3B4000, the performance is improved by more than 50%.
So, how does the Loongson 3A5000 achieve the performance of the 7nm process under the 12nm process?
First of all, the Loongson 3A5000 adopts the new Isaiah architecture, which extends the SIMD instruction set to Loongson's unique LOONGSIMD instruction set. LOONGSIMD can achieve higher parallelism and improve computational efficiency. At the same time, the Loongson 3A5000 also adopts the fourth generation of virtualization technology and supports hardware acceleration, which greatly improves the performance of virtual machines.
Secondly, Loongson has also made a lot of optimizations in the manufacturing process, using the 12nm process, so that the area of the chip has been effectively reduced, and the power consumption has also been reduced. In addition, Loongson has also incorporated some 7nm process results based on the 12nm process, such as the use of new transistors.
Third, Loongson has also made a big breakthrough in chip design. Loongson 3A5000 adopts intelligent prefetching technology to control the size and speed of prefetched data, which can avoid cache pollution and improve access efficiency. At the same time, Loongson has also added many self-developed IP cores to the chip design, such as MCUs, PMUs, PDMs, etc. that support DDR4 memory.
Overall, the advent of the Loongson 3A5000 proves that China's chip industry has gradually acquired the ability to compete with international brands. The performance of the 7nm process under the 12nm process also shows that China's semiconductor industry has achieved a qualitative leap in technological innovation and manufacturing process. It is believed that with the continuous development and growth of Loongson and other enterprises, China's semiconductor industry will surely shine with stronger vitality in the future.
The latest member of China's Loongson commercial processor family, the Loongson 3A5000, was released in Beijing. It is reported that the processor uses a 12nm process, but has 7nm level performance, achieving an ideal balance between performance and power consumption. This achievement has attracted widespread attention in the industry, and also revealed the significant progress made by China's semiconductor industry in research and development, technological innovation and independent controllability.
Loongson 3A5000 is a commercial processor launched by Loongson, whose main application scenarios are server, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other high-performance computing fields. This processor uses a 12nm process, has 24 cores and 48 threads, and has a maximum clock frequency of 2.0GHz. At the same time, due to the new microarchitecture structure and special architecture optimization technology, the performance per watt of the processor has also increased by more than 50% compared with the previous generation.
So, why can the Loongson 3A5000 achieve 7nm performance using a 12nm process? This is mainly due to the "Sunway Taihu Light" supercomputer independently developed by Loongson. As one of the world's fastest supercomputers, Sunway Taihu Light provides valuable technical support and experience accumulation for Loongson with its excellent computing performance and efficient architecture design.
On this basis, Loongson has also made important progress in processor design and manufacturing. First of all, Loongson successfully applied the core technology of the 7nm process to the processor production of the 12nm process through a deep understanding of the processor architecture and process technology; Secondly, Loongson has invested heavily in processor architecture optimization, and has targeted solutions to problems such as multi-core, multi-thread, and high bandwidth. These innovations have laid a solid foundation for the research and development of Loongson 3A5000.
In addition, Loongson has also achieved comprehensive advancements in the software ecosystem and operating system platform. For example, Loongson independently developed Loongnix, a Linux-based operating system, which provides users with comprehensive ecological services and technical support. At the same time, Loongson also cooperates with many software and hardware manufacturers at home and abroad to jointly promote the construction and improvement of the processor ecosystem. These efforts have also provided important support for China's semiconductor industry in terms of software and services.
In short, the release of Loongson 3A5000 is not only an important milestone in the technological innovation and independent control of China's semiconductor industry, but also an important symbol of China's processor industry accelerating towards the high-end market. In the future, with the in-depth advancement of major scientific research projects such as the "Sunway Taihu Light" supercomputer and the national chip project, as well as the continuous improvement of the innovation ability and market competitiveness of China's semiconductor industry, I believe that we will win more technical and market advantages and make more contributions to the development of the global IT industry.