Let's take a look at two CPUs first, one is BX100E-HHU, designed by students from Hohai University, and the other is JSIT-M3201, designed by students from Jiangsu Information Vocational and Technical College.
Both chips have been successfully lit up and the system has been booted, indicating that the design was successful. According to the statement, these two chips will be used in the industry next.
Seeing these two chips, it is estimated that many people will think that it is not a big fuss, just two chips, what's so strange. But in fact, these two chips are really worth talking about.
First of all, these two chips were designed by college students, and they were not developed by some high-level technical team. The second is that these two chips are based on Loongson's open-source OpenLA1000 IP core, as well as the open-source LoongArch32 Reduced instruction set architecture, and then based on SMIC's 180nm process chips.
At the same time, compared with chips of the same type, both chips have excellent performance and power consumption, which are not worse than other competing products.
In this way, everyone understands what is the significance behind these two chips, that is, after Loongson open-sourced the IP core and instruction set, the threshold for chip design has been completely lowered, and even college students and vocational college students can design usable and excellent chips.
Isn't this a bit like ARM? Licensing the instruction set ARM, but also authorizing IP cores, such as CPU, GPU, NPU, etc., then customers with authorization, get the authorization, use the public version of the IP core, you can quickly design a complete mature chip.
For example, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, Huawei, etc., all use ARM's instruction set, some also use IP cores, and some self-developed IP cores, all relying on their own strength.
These companies use ARM to develop a variety of chips, and then help the development of ARM, and finally form the most prosperous ARM ecosystem.
Loongson actually thinks so, because if Loongson wants to develop, it must also unite all the forces that can be united, and it is very difficult to rely on its own company.
Therefore, Loongson has also open-sourced its own instruction set and IP, hoping that more enterprises will participate in it, design more chips based on Loongson's instruction set and IP, and make the Loongson ecosystem stronger and bigger, and then compete with ARM and X86.
In fact, in order to make its own ecology stronger and bigger like ARM, Loongson has also engaged in a "100-core plan", that is, it plans to select 100 colleges and universities and build 100 "chip joint laboratories" within 5 to 10 years, so that college students, starting from university, can use a series of authorizations and technologies provided by Loongson to design qualified chips.
The first two chips are actually one of the achievements of the 100-chip plan, and in the future, as Loongson open-sources more instruction sets and IP cores, and universities establish more laboratories, it is estimated that there will be more and more such chips in the future.
According to Loongson's plan, by 2030, Loongson will be able to stand with X86 and ARM, I don't know if Loongson will be able to achieve this goal by then?