Computing power has emerged as a vital resource for economies around the world. China is no exception, and the country has invested heavily into domestic CPU capabilities. Loongson is at the forefront of that effort. We previously covered the company’s 3A5000 CPU, a quad core processor that delivered reasonable performance per clock, but clocked too low to be competitive.
Now, we’re going to look at Loongson’s newer 3A6000 CPU. The 3A6000 is also a quad core 2.5 GHz part, but uses the newer LA664 core. Compared to the 3A5000’s LA464 cores, LA664 is a major and ambitious evolution. While Loongson has kept the same general architecture, LA664 has a larger and deeper pipeline with more execution units. To sweeten the pie, LA664 gets SMT support. When properly implemented, SMT can increase multithreaded performance with minimal die area overhead. But SMT can be challenging to get right.
Chips and Cheese
I’m always fascinated by China’s attempts at catching up to Intel and AMD, but at the same time, there’s no chance in hell I’d ever use any of it.
They also have an analysis of the significantly improved 3A6000: https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/03/13/loongson-3a6000-a-star-among-chinese-cpus/
Despite huge gains the conclusion is essentially the same. At this point they are still massively behind Intel and AMD in terms of performance. Also, there’s no analysis on power consumption which would be really interesting. And I believe, due to sanctions and lack of access to EUV equipment, we will start to see this gap widen.
I wouldn’t hang my hat on technology restrictions. Incidental to EUV China already has a rapidly growing solid state laser industry with UV and Excimer devices are already in production for domestic use. Of course, international patents mean nothing internally for China, the world can stop them exporting but they can’t stop them copying. FWIW, they do not even have to break rules, much of what developed is reversed engineered from various offshore company takeovers, they do not even have to ship the equipment back to China to collect the knowledge, they just get a VISA and do the technical analysis onsite. Before you know it they have a function duplicate in the domestic market at a tenth the price.
I wouldn’t say they are massively behind. Mostly 1/2 generations behind in terms of microarchitecture. Which I think it is impressive. That allows them to target the value tier segments, at at the very least they are able to start supplying their own domestic desktops for office/government stuff.
As for lithography, They have demonstrated 5nm using multi patterning. So that puts them basically where Intel was 1 generation ago. Again, not the bleeding edge but also not massively behind.
It seems china is investing heavily in high energy sources, like x-rays and focused miniature particle accelerators, so they could skip EUV altogether.
I don’t think they will catch up at the top end for a few more years. But China is starting to be “dangerously” close to satisfy their own demand for anything not super high performance. Which although lower margins, these tend to be where the volume goes. And there is a huge market for value tier consumer products all over the emerging markets.
A similar story happened with wireless. Huawei was behind during the 3G days, they got close with LTE, and they pretty much stablished parity with 5G. Which is what led to the massive freak out of the US gov trying to destroy Huawei.
There are a lot of markets that are reaching that tipping point (EVs, for example).
I think it is impressive what China has been able to accomplish in less than 3 decades.
I would use it, all the research shows not outbount connections of the cpu to be compromised at all. So if a company i trust would produce a motherboard without the “support” chips that the CCP requires i think the design is pretty neat and seems to work fairly well.
Then there is the question of software, can i get it working properly without any and all software that the supported distros provide aka, can i get it to work with base linux and compile my own software, then it is fine.
NaGERST,
It’s not just outbound traffic you need to worry about. There could always be secret trigger payloads to escalate to root (or even higher) access from a webpage and users would be none the wiser.
Unfortunately with hardware it’s always going to be difficult to prove there are no back doors/exploits. Intel CPUs with AMT (a proprietary management interface for workstations) have been successfully exploited. It’s probably a matter of picking your poison.
Call me paranoid, but aside from the MNT Reform that Thom recently reviewed, I highly doubt there is a modern and capable computing platform that is guaranteed not to have backdoors easily exploited by governments. And even that device’s security is contingent on the SoC used in it; as Thom mentioned in that review, there is only one compatible SoC module that is fully open and auditable hardware and it is by far the most expensive one.
I don’t trust the Chinese government certainly, but I also don’t trust my own government. I’m not a conspiracy theorist nutjob, just a realist. Modern governments exist to control the populace, not the other way around as it should be, and one of the strongest tools for controlling people is surveillance. There is not a single piece of technology in my home that I implicitly trust, but it’s a tradeoff for not living like a hermit in a cave in Montana.
Morgan,
There was recent news about NSA buying up private data.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/tech/the-nsa-buys-americans-internet-data-newly-released-documents-show/index.html
The entire article is informative. At least some of the guys in congress care about it, but I think they’re the exception and the majority are for corporations owning and monetizing our private data.
I believe we can break down government involvement into two distinct issues:
1) To what ends are government agencies spying on people to build huge databases on everyone.
This is “read only” access with the goal of obtaining intelligence on civilians. The snowden leaks in particular helped to uncover just how vast these secret government spying operations are in the west.
2) To what ends are government agencies manipulating the public opinion.
This is “write” access including promoting propaganda, social media accounts (ie astroturfing), controlling what contents gets promoted by either controlling a platform or manipulating “the algorithm”.
We know our governments are guilty of #1, but does anyone know if the US government have astroturfing apparatus? In theory, when this is done well, the propaganda enters the echo chamber and people will blindly reiterate it.
This may well fit under the “a conspiracy theorist nutjob” umbrella as you called it, but I can’t rule out that this may be one of russia’s strongest weapons against the west. They could seed a civil war that rips down democracy and NATO without firing a single shot.
I agree, strangely you “alfman” keep argumenting with points i find agreeable. I like you and you bring debth to my comments.
Thank you.
NaGERST,
I tend to like longer detailed discussions, but I have the distinct feeling my preference goes against the trend. Many people just want to get a quick word in and then leave it there. By contrast I end up in the weeds, haha.
I wish everyone could be closer together so that we could have a yearly meetup instead of just the online thing. Oh well.
I’m in Australia, and frankly I would use these chips. I have never actually seen evidence that the Chinese are low-jacking equipment sold overseas. The only group that has claimed it is the NSA/Americans. “Trust us bro they’re doing it”. Well the NSA is KNOWN to be doing it and there is a lot of proof that the NSA is hacking equipment and doing dodgy espionage. I don’t really care which foreign power is spying on my computer usage because China buys all their raw materials from us and the USA owns most of our country anyway. Either hook the kit up to a hub and use Wireshark to capture malicious network traffic in read mode. Or stop making claims without evidence. It’s not hard to publish what you know and how you know it.
Frankly there is too much USA presence in Australia, and far too much money flows overseas to US Tech companies. We should have developed a domestic software industry ages ago and we should be developing our own Operating Systems and Application software. Especially for government/military applications.
Well to look at it from another perspective.
If you’re a private citizen in the US with no connections to government or any industry the chinese care about, the chinese government has absolutely no interest in you nor any influence over you.
On the other hand, the US government does have control and interest.
Also these processors are intended for use in china, they don’t expect to sell them to foreign users (indeed it is extremely hard to even get hold of them outside china).
I feel that China is behind and it won’t catch the western counterparts anytime soon. Due to the common approach, attract western tech with cheap manufacturing promises, learn from it and then produce and sell it yourself, preferably at dumping prices, this won’t work here. Western companies are too protective to allow it. Here China will really need to develop a better solution on their own, currently not realistic option. If they would do it and it would be twice as fast at half the price. Then everybody would be using it.