How good are Chinese CPUs? Benchmarking the Loongson 3A6000
28 points by serce
28 points by serce
Beware: horrifying AI slop of a headline image.
The article below it isn't great. It's a very limited set of benchmarks and the results require you to multiple three columns together to get the number that you might care about.
But it does mention a much better article at the end.
What are the instruction sets on these new chips from China? Last I heard they were really doubling down on RISC V. I don’t see RISC V mentioned in these articles. Are these new in-house ISAs? The article mentions LoongArch. It sounds like a new architecture. I wonder if there was a reason to move away from RISC V, and create a new instruction set architecture.
The Loongson family traces back to MIPS64 and predates or at least starts contemporary with RISC V. LoongAarch is merely the latest iteration, and to my understanding borrows stuff from RISC V where needed.
LoongArch indeed draws heavy inspiration from MIPS and RISC-V, but it should be noted that it is a distinct and incompatible ISA. (Interestingly, one of the LoongArch ISA extensions assists in dynamic binary translation from MIPS, in addition to Arm and x86.)
It's a huge country; it's not like every semiconductor company has agreed on a single ISA for everything. I know there are Chinese companies producing C-SKY, LoongArch, MIPS, RISC-V, and x86 chips just off the top of my head (with C-SKY and LoongArch being the homegrown ones). There are probably other niche Chinese ISAs that I'm forgetting here.
There are probably other niche Chinese ISAs that I'm forgetting here.
Xtensa wasn't exactly a niche Chinese ISA (originally designed by Tensilica, now owned by Cadence) but it was used heavily in the Espressif ESPxxxx line of processors before they switched to RISC-V.
I wasn't sure I was remembering the details right but it sounds like LoongArch started out as MIPS64 minus 4 instructions that were covered by patents but has evolved into approximately a fork of MIPS64 with some RISC-V features added to it.
I'm actually kind of intrigued by this... the MIPS ISA has always had a special place in my heart.
a relatively recent Intel processor (Ice Lake)
For context, the Xeon model he is using for testing was released almost 5 years ago.
I have a 3a5000-based motherboard in the mail somewhere from a Chinese recycler, I'm looking forward to trying it out in general. It didn't come with a cooler, so it might be a little while for me to get it operational, especially if I have to fabricate something.