According to Chinese sources, the Loongson 3A5000 processor based on the latest Chinese LoongArch microarchitecture will go into mass production in May or June this year. This was announced yesterday at Clean Energy Expo China 2021 by representatives of the developer. The LoongArch architecture will be in all Loongson processors that are in development from 2020.

The announcement of the LoongArch architecture and the transfer of the Loongson processors to a new architecture while simultaneously abandoning the MIPS microarchitecture was a big surprise, which we learned about ten days ago. Going forward, the Chinese will not rely on MIPS architecture and instruction set licensing, and all new processors do not support any MIPS instruction set.

The new LoongArch instruction system supports about 2000 instructions and includes all the necessary extensions, including vector instructions, virtualization and binary translation. It can translate commands of all leading operating systems and applications into understandable Loongson processors. It will be interesting to know what is the percentage of LoongArch broadcast loss. Loongson processors based on MIPS architecture lost up to 20% of performance during broadcast.

The Loongson 3A5000 processors were expected late last year. The digital project was prepared for the production of photomasks last spring. As you can see, the release of the 12-nm novelty was delayed, but this may be due to the fact that checking the new architecture for licensed purity turned out to be more difficult than it was thought.