Loongson Launches 3D5000 CPUs For China’s Domestic Servers: 32 Cores Up To 2 GHz, Up To 300W, 4 Times Faster Than ARM Chips

China-based CPU manufacturer, Loongson, has announced its brand new 3D5000 CPUs for the HPC market with up to 32 cores.

The Loongson 3D5000 HPC CPUs will be aimed at China's domestic server market segment and HPC customers. The chips will utilize the LoongArch architecture. The Loongson Technology's "LA" core is a proprietary microarchitecture called LoongArch and is part of the Godson III series. The company claims that the CPUs will offer excellent performance for cloud / super-computing and large data center workloads while claiming to offer up to 4 times faster performance than typical ARM chips.

Under the hood, the Loongson 3D5000 CPUs are packaged by fusing two of the existing 3C5000 chips together in a chiplet fashion. These are the same chips that were designed to target AMD's original Zen and Zen+ cores while the next-gen 6000 series is said to target AMD Zen 3 and Intel Tiger Lake architecture performance. The process of choice is 12nm FinFET for the upcoming LA 664 cores but the architecture will see some major rework.

Each 3C5000 chiplet packs a total of 16 LA464 cores which make up 32 LA464 cores on the top SKU. The CPU also carries 64 MB of L3 cache, support for 8 channels of DDR4-3200 ECC memory, and a total of five HT 3.0 interconnects since the platform supports 2-Way and 4-Way CPU support for up to 128-cores per board. This multi-path CPU interconnection is achieved through the Loongson 7A2000 Bridge which will be a crucial part of the new platform.

As for the platform itself, the Loongson 3D5000 CPUs will feature support on the LGA 4129 socket that supports 150-300W TDP SKUs. At 150W, the top 32-core SKU will have each core sipping in at close to 5W of power. A reference platform has been showcased with 16 DDR4 DIMM slots and a two-way CPU configuration. A vast variety of systems and servers by various China-based vendors were showcased during the event too.

Some performance estimates shown revealed up to 1 TFLOP of FP64 compute prowess. Besides that, the platform has the necessary security in place to prevent some vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown (to name a few).

The SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark is a CPU benchmark application suite that pushes a processor to evaluate its performance and includes a compiler and memory subsystem. It is a standardized processor test in the industry. The Loongson 3D5000 has recently been tested and benchmarked, with scores of 400 points for the SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark test in base tests and over 800 points in the benchmark using a two-way 32-core configuration.

To know how these new Loongson 3D5000 HPC CPUs for China's domestic market perform, one would have to get one of those units and that may not be happening anytime soon. The first CPU servers are expected to ship out to Chinese companies so if some units end up in back-channels, they will be very hard to come by and will cost a fortune to get your hands on one.

What we have seen with previous Chinese performance claims is that huge numbers are put out but in actual real-world use cases, the performance ends up being totally lackluster. We hope that's not the case with the Loongson 3D5000 CPUs and that China does find a foothold in the ever-evolving HPC space.

2-Way Loongson 3D5000 CPU Server (Image Credits: MyDrivers):

News Sources: MyDrivers #1, #2