Chinese rival to Intel and AMD vows to close performance gap with trio of CPUs nicknamed Three Musketeers

Loongson is simply a awesome subordinate successful China, creating home chips for nan past 22 years pinch nan extremity of providing affordable alternatives to Intel and AMD products. Historically, however, location has ever been a noticeable capacity spread betwixt its homegrown CPUs and those from extracurricular China.

Now, Fast Technology reports Loongson has been moving difficult down nan scenes to adjacent that spread and is preparing to motorboat a trio of fourth-generation CPUs, collectively known arsenic nan "Three Musketeers."

Loongson’s first-generation chips included nan 3A1000 and 3B1500, followed by nan second-generation 3A2000 and 3A3000, and past nan third-generation 3A4000, 3A5000, and 3C5000/S/D. The fourth-generation chips are nan Loongson 3A6000, 3B6000M, and 3C6000.

Tock-Tock2-Tick

“Loongson follows a improvement rule based connected independently researching halfway IP to amended single-core general-purpose performance. It adopts a strategy akin to Intel's erstwhile 'Tick-Tock' improvement approach, wherever 'Tick' refers to process loop and 'Tock' to architecture and creation optimization," Fast Technology's study added.

For this caller generation, Loongson has adopted a "Tock-Tock2-Tick" approach, meaning “two rounds of creation optimizations earlier a process iteration,” aiming to maximize nan capacity of existing mature processes, which are astir comparable to nan world 7nm level.

The Loongson 3A6000 is already available, but very small is presently known astir nan 3B6000M too nan truth it will merge GPGPU graphics and computing cores. The 3C6000 server processor has reportedly returned for sample testing and is expected to vessel successful Q4 2024. What's peculiarly absorbing is that Loongson has developed upgraded versions of nan Three Musketeers - nan 3A6600, 3B6600, and 3C6600 - arsenic portion of nan 2nd "Tock."

The 3B6600, which is scheduled for tape-out successful nan first half of adjacent year, will reportedly besides merge GPGPU graphics and computing cores, for illustration nan 3B6000M.

Loongson’s fourth-generation CPUs will merge high-speed PCIe interfaces, “allowing connections to dedicated graphics cards, web cards, RAID array cards, and more, pinch a anemic southbridge connected via PCIe,” Fast Technology added.

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