Evaluation of domestic self-developed chips in the new era Godson 3A4000

In recent two years, the domestic IC industry has been paid close attention to by people inside and outside the industry, and the momentum of domestic self-developed chips and domestic self-developed systems in the commercial field is growing. As a technology leader and supplier of domestic self-developed processors, Loongson Zhongke recently brought us a new generation of processor architecture products: Loongson 3A4000 processor.

Godson 3A4000

Introduction of Godson 3A4000

The Loongson 3A4000 processor uses 28nm technology and has four cores, which is consistent with the previous generation 3A3000. In terms of frequency, the Loongson 3A4000 processor is turbo-charged to 2.0GHz, while the 3A3000 processor is 1.5GHz, and the frequency is increased by 0.5GHz. In addition, the Loongson 3A4000 processor is upgraded to GS464V, which supports MIPS64 instruction set, and has expanded more than 1,000 instructions on the basis of only 500 instructions.

On the whole, compared with the previous generation 3A3000, the Loongson 3A4000 processor has not only greatly improved its performance, but also upgraded and optimized its security and encryption, built-in security modules and supported a variety of encryption and decryption algorithms.

Loongson 3A4000 mainframe sample

Because the Loongson 3A4000 processor is a domestic self-developed chip, facing the commercial field, it is not compatible with the mainstream American AMD and Intel platforms in the consumer market, so it needs to use the dedicated motherboard of the Loongson 7A2000 chipset to adapt to it. In addition, the Loongson 3A4000 processor is not compatible with the Windows system based on X86 architecture. The Loongson 3A4000 processor uses the upgraded GS464V architecture, which requires an adaptation system based on LINUX kernel.

This time, the system we used to test the Loongson 3A4000 processor is the UOS unified operating system (UOS is the system code, and this article will use the UOS system uniformly). Based on the LINUX kernel, the UOS system has been adapted to the Loongson 3A4000 processor.

UOS system

Although it is still in the testing stage, UOS system has great potential, which is a safe, easy-to-use and stable operating system product voluntarily initiated and developed by many domestic operating system core enterprises, which is of great significance. Besides Godson Zhongke, other domestic self-developed chip manufacturers will also adapt and support the UOS system, which means that the domestic hardware industry and software industry will be unified and integrated, which will greatly promote the development and progress of the domestic IC industry.

UOS system

At present, except for the newly released 3A4000 processor, some other models of Loongson have been compatible with UOS system, fully adapting to Loongson desktop computers and servers.　

02 Loongson 3A4000 Test

This time, I had the opportunity to get the newly released Loongson 3A4000. We compared it with Loongson 3A3000.

Loongson 3A4000 mainframe

Test platform:

The Loongson 3A4000 processor is a quad-core processor. The basic frequency of this CPU in our test host is 1.8GHz, which can be turbo-charged to 2.0GHz, with a memory of DDR4 2400 8G * 2, a memory of DDR3 128MB and a hard disk of 128G, and its bridge is 7A1000 bridge developed by Loongson.

Godson 3A4000 Host Configuration

Test items:

There are five items in our evaluation this time: WPS three-piece test, image and video opening speed and 7.Zip decompression comparison test, and finally Web page test and SPEC2006 test.

WPS three-piece test:

In the WPS three-piece test, we use more than 10MB documents, more than 20MB tables and more than 300MB PPT to test the opening speed of Loongson 3A4000 and Loongson 33000 processors.

WPS three-piece test

There is no speed difference between the two processors when opening documents with a size of more than 10MB, both of which are within 1 second, but the author can still feel that the Loongson 3A4000 host is smoother and faster with the naked eye. However, the gap between the opening speed of forms above 20MB began to appear. Compared with 3A3000, the Godson 3A4000 improved by more than one second, and the gap in opening speed of PPT above 300MB increased by as much as three seconds. However, in fact, no matter whether using Godson 3A4000 or Godson 33000, daily work can be carried out smoothly without any bottleneck.

Picture Video Open Test:

In addition to office documents, let’s test the video opening speed and picture opening speed of the two processors.

Picture video opening speed

In these three tests, the Loongson 3A4000 processor still occupies an absolute advantage, which is faster than the Loongson 3A3000 processor. At the same time, it also tells us that there is no problem with the view and audio of these two processors, and both the view software, the video software and the OFFICE software linux have products corresponding to the Windows system, such as WPS corresponding to Office, so there is no need to worry about the problem of being unable to use and operate.

7.Zip decompression test:

7.Zip should be familiar to everyone. This is a very popular decompression software, which is often seen in Windows systems. One thing to note is that UOS did not pre-install 7.Zip. We used a notebook equipped with LOONGNIX processor, and the frequency was only 1.5GHz. The Loongnix mainframe was replaced by neokylin system.

After we open the terminal, we input the command LSCPU, and then we can start running after continuously inputting nuame-r and 7z a. The test results of Loongson 3A4000 and Loongson 3A3000 are as follows.

Godson 3A3000 Godson 3A4000 　 　 　

Compared with the 3,709 score of the Godson 3A3000, the running score of the Godson 3A 4000 at 1.5GHz is 5,470, which is about 47% higher, and the score is very impressive. 7.Zip is one of the most commonly used applications in daily life. Although it can’t fully reflect the processor performance, it can show the processor efficiency. Undoubtedly, the efficiency of the Godson 3A 4000 is greatly improved compared with that of the previous generation. If it is the Godson 3A4000 at 2.0GHz,

Principled Technologies WebXPRT 3 test:

Although the UOS system of Loongson 3A4000 platform has not supported much in software testing, the Web page testing is not restricted. The UOS system for web page testing that can be used in Windows system can also be used. We use the Principled Technologies WebXPRT 3 test, which can reflect the performance of all devices that support the Web.

The browser tested is a built-in browser in UOS system, based on the Chromium kernel, which is an open source core and is used by many browsers.

Godson 3A3000 Godson 3A4000 　 　

This Web page tests that it contains six scenes based on HTML5 and JavaScript for mirroring daily tasks. In this test, the Loongson 3A4000 processor still achieved the performance crushing of the previous generation Loongson 3A3000, with a total score difference of 24 points.

In the six scenarios of JavaScript, the efficiency of each operation of Loongson 3A4000 processor has been greatly improved, including photo enhancement by about 63%, photo album arrangement by using artificial intelligence by about 74%, stock option pricing by about 59%, encrypted notes and OCR scanning by about 69%, sales charts by 69% and online work by 49%.

SPEC 2006 test：

SPEC 2006 is a large-scale CPU performance test project, which can fully show the two most important parameters of CPU: fixed-point performance and floating-point performance, and has been recognized by everyone in the field of commercial CPU.

SPEC 2006 test

SPEC 2006 test results

In the test, two processors, the Godson 3A4000 processor and the Godson 3A3000 processor, are compared. These two processors are both four cores. Whether it is the performance test of SPEC INT2006 fixed-point performance test, SPEC FP2006 floating-point performance test and STREAM(GB) memory bandwidth, the performance of the Godson 3A4000 processor has been greatly improved, almost doubling the effect. This performance can be achieved only by optimizing the architecture and increasing the price, which shows that the design and research and development of the Godson are amazing.

03 summary

At present, although the development of domestic chip industry is not as good as that of foreign semiconductor industry, especially foreign semiconductor manufacturers may invest tens of billions of dollars in chip research and development a year, while the domestic chip industry has limited funds, and the chip research and development starts later than foreign counterparts. There is indeed a gap as a whole. However, Loongson has been able to concentrate on research and development for 20 years on one architecture, and continuously iteratively upgrade the Loongson 3A processor chip. It has successively launched the Loongson 3A2000 processor, 3A3000 processor and 3A4000 processor just released at the end of the year, and kept its performance rising, which has fully demonstrated its R&D and design capabilities.

The performance of Godson 3A4000 processor is comparable to that of AMD’s Excavator architecture CPU, whether it is the underlying architecture or the physical design. Moreover, Godson 3A4000 processor can effectively prevent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, support encryption and decryption algorithms such as MD5, AES and SHA, and eliminate any risks in security.

The Loongson 3A4000 processor adopts 28nm process, and there is still a lot of room for upgrading and optimization. Under the same 28nm process, the CPU performance of the Loongson 3A4000 processor is improved by 6 times compared with that of the first-generation Loongson 3A1000 processor with the same process. It is reported that the next-generation Loongson 3A5000 processor will use 12nm process next year, and the CPU frequency can be increased to 3.0GHz, which is full of stamina.

Ordinary users may have questions, why do you want to launch domestic self-developed CPU chips so vigorously, and it is not good to introduce it abroad? It may be practical in the short term, but it must not be a long-term solution. The core technology is not in our own hands and will inevitably be subject to others. In the field of domestic CPU, what we need to do now is not to catch up blindly, but to avoid being useless, that is, what we need to solve now is the problem of 0 and 1. It is believed that Godson, which has always insisted on independent design and has the ability to realize all independent designs, can enter the civil market in the near future.