Loongson Technology, a renowned chip manufacturer based out of Beijing, China, has unveiled its first-ever self-developed CPU architecture that makes use of an original instruction set. As per a CGTN report, the company is calling it LoongArch, which is the short form for Loongson Architecture. According to the company, the LoongArch has passed the assessment of a “leading third-party intellectual property evaluating agency.”
If you don’t know, an instruction set architecture (ISA) is the interface between the hardware and software of a computer. Long story short, it's the underlying architecture that provides support to run the operating system (OS) along with the entire software ecosystem. To make it easier for your understanding, it's just like how Windows operating system runs on Intel’s x86 architecture and the Android mobile operating system runs on ARM architecture.
Loongson Technology Aims to Help China Become Completely Self-Dependent
So far, the two popular ISAs brands (Intel and ARM Holding) have been dominating the entire computers and smartphones market respectively across the globe. However, it seems that the well-established companies are going to witness a new rival that is all set to step into the market. It would be interesting to see how the US and UK based companies are going to get affected by the entrance of Loongson Technology in the CPU architecture business.
According to Hu Weiwu, chairman and chief scientist of Loongson, who's also the chief engineer of the Institute of Computing Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), foreign CPU manufacturers use ISAs from the two above mentioned brands to control their software and ecosystem because they haven't got any other alternative. If Chinese companies are going to rely on the ISAs from foreign brands, then it would be difficult for them to create an independent industrial ecosystem. It seems that this is the only reason Loongson Technology has created its self-developed CPU architecture to break this duopoly.
Furthermore, Hu added that the company's new CPU chip based on the new architecture is called 3A5000. It went under internal testing, and the processing performance is tipped to be equivalent to the mainstream CPU performance that is currently available in the market. Hu also suggested that a complete operating system based on the "LoongArch" has also run stably on computers during the internal tests.
