Loongson

Loongson (龙芯, dragon core, therefore, also known as Dragon Core) is the name of a method developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences CPU. The development versions of this processor are called Godson.

Since 2002, several generations of the processor are published, and since 2007 there is a collaboration with STMicroelectronics worldwide distribution.

The instruction set of the Loongson processor is MIPS - compatible. Therefore, operating systems such as Linux, OpenBSD and Windows CE, not Windows, running on this processor.

The latest version, Loongson 3A quad-core, model "ICT Loongson -3A V0.5 FPU V0.1 ", supports DDR3 SDRAM and USB in version 2.0, is about as fast as a dual-core Pentium 4 processor with 2-3 GHz, but needs only an electric power of 15 watts.

The fastest model that can be available for purchase in the 65 nm -made, stocked with one 256 -bit SIMD vector unit per core 8 -core processor " Loongson 3B " is. There is as yet no vendor-independent test results for this model. However, this is accomplished according to the manufacturer 172.8 GFLOPS ( billion floating point operations per second) in double precision. The electrical power should be about 40 watts.

A special feature of the Loongson CPUs of the latest generation, the ability of the hardware - assisted x86 emulation. In this case, 5% of the chip surface is used to support instructions 200 which accelerate the emulation such that 70% of the native performance is achieved with the use of the emulator QEMU on average. The Loongson 3A can accelerate following Intel - specific commands via the hardware: Integer x86, x87 FPU, MMX, SSE2 and SSE1.

The performance per watt is relatively good. Measured by the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark - makes a Loongson 3A averaged ~ 9.26 watts 788 points in peak value. Compared with a Phenom II X4 955BE, which has a power dissipation of 125 watts, and makes 2797 points in the peak value, the processing performance per watt is more than twice as high.