Just two years after Loongson stopped using American vehicles to reduce its reliance on foreign technology, it reached an important milestone. In the statement made by the company, the new processor they developed is capable of replacing foreign hardware in China’s data centers.An important step for China
China-based chip maker Loongson announced the 3D5000 at an event. This is the third processor the company has produced using proprietary ISA LoongArch. The firm had previously launched the quad-core 3A5000, powered by the 16-core 3C5000 in 2021 and 2022. The newly announced 32-core 3D5000 consists of an interconnected 3C5000 core complex. Meanwhile, LoongArch is actually an old architecture, but the company built LoongArch from scratch in order not to rely on foreign technology to develop its processors.
The Loongson 3D5000 uses LA464 cores designed for use in data centers. The cores running at 2 GHz have 64 MB of L3 cache shared between the two complexes. Processors that support eight-channel DDR4-3200 ECC memory and HyperTransport interface will have a TDP of 300W. However, according to Loongson, their processors will consume around 150W in most scenarios.Scalable up to 128 cores
Loongson not only produced the 3D5000 processor, but also created a complete ecosystem. The processor, which has its own socket called LGA 4129, supports 2P and 4P configurations. Therefore, an installation of up to 128 cores can be accessed depending on the platform. For this setup, the 7A2000 bridge chip is needed. According to the chip designer, the 7A2000 is up to 400 percent faster than the previous generation.It’s hard to predict how CPUs like the 3D5000 will perform. Loongson says it scored 425 in the SPEC CPU 2006 integer benchmark. Estimating performance is very difficult, but not impossible, as the test result presented is based on an older version. Because the six-year-old 32-core AMD EPYC 7601 scores 1170 in the same test. So it’s about 2.5 times faster than the 3D5000. While this is still a good result for Loongson, it shows how far Loongson has to go before it can compete with AMD and Intel. Of course, Loongson did not aim to compete with its giant rivals because the goal is to be self-sufficient.
While performance isn’t the 3D5000’s strengths, security seems to be. It is claimed that the processor has a custom-made mechanism against security vulnerabilities such as Meltdown or Specter. The chip also has its own Trusted Platform Module (TPM) so it doesn’t need an external solution. It is also stated to have a built-in security module that supports a secret national algorithm.
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