China's Latest Loongson CPUs Are On Par With AMD's Excavator

[harlan4096]

The push for China's technological autonomy continues.

According to a MyDrivers report, Chinese chipmaker Loongson, formerly known as Godson, has announced its latest quad-core 3A4000 and 3B4000 processors. The first is aimed at the mainstream market while the latter is designed for the server market. The chips are 100% made in China and don't rely on any third-party intellectual property.

Loongson president Hu Weiwu has stated that the 3A4000 delivers twice the performance of its predecessor, the 3A3000. Hu goes on to mention that processor's performance is comparable to that of AMD's 28nm Excavator parts, which launched in 2015.

Both 3A4000 and 3B4000 employ the GS464V microarchitecture and are built on STMicroelectronics' 28nm FD-SOI (Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator) manufacturing process and utilize the FCBGA-1211 package. The processors are equipped with four cores, 8MB of L3 cache and operating clocks that span between 1.8 GHz to 2 GHz.

Loongson's latest pair of 28nm parts support DDR4-2400 memory, dynamic frequency and voltage regulation, which should help improve battery life in laptops. The 3A4000 draws up to 30W, 40W and 50W at 1.5 GHz, 1.8 GHz and 2 GHz, respectively.

The 3B4000, which is the server chip, plays nice with ECC (error-correcting code) memory and can be deployed in a eight-way configuration to offer fourfold the performance of the previous 3B3000 that was limited to a two-way configuration.

In terms of security features, the 3A4000 and 3B4000 come with integrated mechanisms to shield against vulnerabilities, such as Meltdown and Spectre. The processors also support encryption and decryption algorithms, including MD5, AES and SHA.

Loongson has already plotted the path for next year. The chipmaker expects to introduce the quad-core 3A5000 and 16-core 3C5000 chips to the Chinese market. The new processors would be based on a more up-to-date 12nm manufacturing process and come clocked up to 2.5 GHz.
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