China’s Loongson Announces Eight-Core Laptop Processor with 4K Support and PCIe 3.0

Chinese government-backed chipmaker Loongson has announced three new chips, one aimed at servers, one at industrial solutions, and one at laptops. Details about the new processors are traditionally few.

Image source: Loongson

Loongson created its own instruction set, Loongarch, a few years ago that combines elements of MIPS and RISC-V technologies. The company’s desktop processors are considered to be about five years behind those of Intel and AMD, but at least 10,000 PCs with the chips are already running in Chinese schools as part of a pilot project. Loongson processors also became the basis for a cloud platform that was launched on a Chinese space station.

Last Wednesday, April 2, the company introduced two new chips: 2K3000 and 3B6000M. They include eight supposedly 64-bit LA364E cores and updated integrated LG 200 graphics, which demonstrates peak performance of 256 Gflops in single-precision floating-point calculations and 8 TOPS for 8-bit fixed-point numbers. The processors are similar: they can be produced on the same wafer, but have different packaging.

The processors posted a “fixed-point single-core [for numbers] score of 30 based on the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark at a base frequency of 2.5 GHz,” a test that became obsolete in 2018, The Register notes. Manufacturers who choose to build laptops with Loongson 3B6000M chips won’t have to compromise: These processors can handle 4K video at 60 frames per second, and support PCIe 3.0, USB 3.0, and USB 2.0, SATA 3.0, and eMMC. These computers will be able to run the manufacturer’s own Loongnix Linux distribution or other Chinese distributions that support the Loongarch architecture, including Kylin.

Last week, Loongson also showed off a 64-core server processor and a dual-socket server to house the chips. Finally, the company released a list of 120 applications compatible with its architecture, including medical software, databases, and office suites.