What is "next-generation" about these? Article states it's a 12nm chip and compares it to AMD and Intel offerings that are half the nm size and 3+ years old.
What is "next-generation" about these?
Article states it's a 12nm chip and compares it to AMD and Intel offerings that are half the nm size and 3+ years old.
From the looks of it, complete “in-house” (i.e. kept nationally Chinese) development and manufacturing of the chips. It’s something which basically no other country, including the US, can boast....
What is "next-generation" about these?
From the looks of it, complete “in-house” (i.e. kept nationally Chinese) development and manufacturing of the chips.
It’s something which basically no other country, including the US, can boast. Sure, at the highest (or smallest?) end of the tech, we’ve arrived at way different performance figures, but how “stable” is that? How many countries are involved (try to answer from both a Chinese and an American/European POV)?
I think this is a huge announcement, especially given the apparently custom ISA. This is basically China saying “we’re a few years away from being able to remove 90% of your state-of-the-art chip production [by invading Taiwan] without suffering major repercussions for our own CPU output” – the handful of serious chip production locations in NA/across Europe, last I read about them, were either still at even bigger node sizes than this one, or have not even completed site construction…
Article states it's a 12nm chip and compares it to AMD and Intel offerings that are half the nm size and 3+ years old.
It is, literally, the next generation of their chips. And being only three or so years behind when building such an immensely complicated technology in essence from the ground up is, as far as I can tell, basically equal to having caught up fully.
I would be very, very interested in knowing whether they, too, still depend on the wizardry photolithography machines from Dutch company ASML for the foundries, which to my knowledge every single modern semiconductor manufacturing process active in the world up until now has been using/has had to use.
Edit: the article even outright states
China has made tremendous efforts to achieving tech self-sufficiency in the chip sector amid Western blockades
I'd note that the nm is practically useless at this point - it'd be like if Fedex and UPS tried to compete by listing out their maximum width. Everyone made fun of Intel when they shifted from...
Article states it's a 12nm chip and compares it to AMD
I'd note that the nm is practically useless at this point - it'd be like if Fedex and UPS tried to compete by listing out their maximum width. Everyone made fun of Intel when they shifted from 10nm to just "7", but they are right, in a sense - their 10nm was the same transistor density as TSMC 7nm.
All that being said, almost certainly it is still considerably worse than TSMC 3nm or 5nm. The article is using next generation quite literally
Chinese company Loongson released its next-generation computer central processing unit (CPU) 3A6000 in Beijing on Tuesday.
Like, it's literally their next generation of chips.
Chinese company Loongson released its next-generation computer central processing unit (CPU) 3A6000 in Beijing on Tuesday. The CPU is self-designed with key indexes comparable to those of global mainstream products, which observers said marked China's new breakthrough in the design of domestic CPUs.
The Loongson 3A6000 processor uses a fourth-generation LoongArch, an instruction set architecture (ISA) processor. It is manufactured using 12-nanometer technology and features a quad-core design, with an operating frequency of 2.5GHz. It adopts a domestic instruction system and structure, and it belongs to a new generation of general-purpose processors that are self-developed and technologically controllable.
I can't tell if this is a mistranslation or the author has no idea what this phrase means :D (that, or I'm witnessing the birth of the most obnoxiously meaningless phrase since "genre fiction")
an instruction set architecture (ISA) processor
I can't tell if this is a mistranslation or the author has no idea what this phrase means :D
(that, or I'm witnessing the birth of the most obnoxiously meaningless phrase since "genre fiction")
Yeah, I’d be curious to know if it really is a different ISA (and if yes, how long this has been in development for, and how extensively tested. But it’s Chinese tech, so we’ll likely never know)....
Yeah, I’d be curious to know if it really is a different ISA (and if yes, how long this has been in development for, and how extensively tested. But it’s Chinese tech, so we’ll likely never know).
But “LoongArch” sure doesn’t sound like something similar to “x86” or “ARM64”, so unless it’s their version of marketing speak (or trying to hype the R&D departments’ accomplishments up), it probably indeed is different instructions/custom architecture.
Jokes aside, I read this as an egregious mistranslation of "the CPU's ISA is LoongArch, which is an ISA". Portmanteauing the company's name with -arch seems like a plausible way to name an...
Jokes aside, I read this as an egregious mistranslation of "the CPU's ISA is LoongArch, which is an ISA". Portmanteauing the company's name with -arch seems like a plausible way to name an architecture.
As far as I could tell when I read about this earlier it's basically MIPS64 with a bunch of extensions. Apparently it already has good linux support. Their earlier chips were running more-or-less...
As far as I could tell when I read about this earlier it's basically MIPS64 with a bunch of extensions. Apparently it already has good linux support. Their earlier chips were running more-or-less a vanilla MIPS32 ISA, and I've read that Richard Stallman was using a laptop with a Loongson chip circa 2010.
I wonder if it's more rebranded Intel chips like it was a few months ago
What is "next-generation" about these?
Article states it's a 12nm chip and compares it to AMD and Intel offerings that are half the nm size and 3+ years old.
From the looks of it, complete “in-house” (i.e. kept nationally Chinese) development and manufacturing of the chips.
It’s something which basically no other country, including the US, can boast. Sure, at the highest (or smallest?) end of the tech, we’ve arrived at way different performance figures, but how “stable” is that? How many countries are involved (try to answer from both a Chinese and an American/European POV)?
I think this is a huge announcement, especially given the apparently custom ISA. This is basically China saying “we’re a few years away from being able to remove 90% of your state-of-the-art chip production [by invading Taiwan] without suffering major repercussions for our own CPU output” – the handful of serious chip production locations in NA/across Europe, last I read about them, were either still at even bigger node sizes than this one, or have not even completed site construction…
It is, literally, the next generation of their chips. And being only three or so years behind when building such an immensely complicated technology in essence from the ground up is, as far as I can tell, basically equal to having caught up fully.
I would be very, very interested in knowing whether they, too, still depend on the
wizardryphotolithography machines from Dutch company ASML for the foundries, which to my knowledge every single modern semiconductor manufacturing process active in the world up until now has been using/has had to use.Edit: the article even outright states
I'd note that the nm is practically useless at this point - it'd be like if Fedex and UPS tried to compete by listing out their maximum width. Everyone made fun of Intel when they shifted from 10nm to just "7", but they are right, in a sense - their 10nm was the same transistor density as TSMC 7nm.
All that being said, almost certainly it is still considerably worse than TSMC 3nm or 5nm. The article is using next generation quite literally
Like, it's literally their next generation of chips.
I can't tell if this is a mistranslation or the author has no idea what this phrase means :D
(that, or I'm witnessing the birth of the most obnoxiously meaningless phrase since "genre fiction")
Yeah, I’d be curious to know if it really is a different ISA (and if yes, how long this has been in development for, and how extensively tested. But it’s Chinese tech, so we’ll likely never know).
But “LoongArch” sure doesn’t sound like something similar to “x86” or “ARM64”, so unless it’s their version of marketing speak (or trying to hype the R&D departments’ accomplishments up), it probably indeed is different instructions/custom architecture.
Jokes aside, I read this as an egregious mistranslation of "the CPU's ISA is LoongArch, which is an ISA". Portmanteauing the company's name with -arch seems like a plausible way to name an architecture.
edit: they've made processors with it before
As far as I could tell when I read about this earlier it's basically MIPS64 with a bunch of extensions. Apparently it already has good linux support. Their earlier chips were running more-or-less a vanilla MIPS32 ISA, and I've read that Richard Stallman was using a laptop with a Loongson chip circa 2010.