Loongson

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Loongson (Chinese: 龙芯; pinyin: lóngxīn, academic name: Godson, also known as Dragon chip) is a family of general-purpose MIPS-compatible CPUs developed at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in the People's Republic of China. The chief architect is Professor Weiwu Hu.

Loongson is the result of a public-private partnership. BLX IC Design Corporation was founded in 2002 by ICT and Jiangsu Zhongyi Group. Based in Beijing, BLX focuses on designing the advanced 32-bit/64-bit Loongson general-purpose and embedded processors, together with developing software tools and reference platforms.

ST Microelectronics fabricates and markets Loongson chips for BLX, which is fabless.

Contents

[edit] Name

The processor was initially named 狗剩 (pinyin: Gou Sheng), meaning "Dog Leftover" in Chinese, to follow the Chinese tradition of giving a newborn baby a humble name for easier upbringing and better health. "Godson" was the English name, as it is pronounced similarly to "Gou Sheng". Later, Loongson, which means the "Dragon Core" Chip, was declared as the official name, with "Godson" still being used as an internal codename by developers. [1]

[edit] MIPS patent issues

Loongson's instruction set is MIPS compatible, but the internal microarchitecture is independently developed by ICT. Early implementations of the family lacked four instructions patented by MIPS Technologies to avoid legal issues. [2]

In 2007, a deal was reached by MIPS Technologies and ICT. ST Microelectronics bought a MIPS license for Loongson and thus the processor can be promoted as MIPS Based or MIPS compatible instead of MIPS-like. [3] [4] [5]

In June 2009, ICT licenced the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures directly from MIPS Technologies. [6]

[edit] Architecture revisions

CPU Godson 2C DXP100.

[edit] Loongson 1

The first revision of the Loongson architecture, the Loongson1 is a pure 32-bit CPU running at a clock speed of 266 MHz. Its primary focus is with embedded designs such as cash registers, where 64-bit capability and high speed are not necessary.

[edit] Loongson 2

The Loongson 2 adds 64-bit capability to the Loongson architecture. Initially running at 500 MHz, later revisions to Godson 2E were produced that run up to 1 GHz, while the latest Godson 2F being produced at 1.2 GHz and released to market in early 2008.

On December 26, 2007, China revealed its first Loongson based supercomputer of 1 teraflops (the actual capacity is about 350G) in Hefei, designated as KD-50-I[7]. This supercomputer was designed by a joint team led by academician Mr. Chen Guoliang (陈国良), professor of the computer science technology major of the University of Science and Technology of China (the primary contractor, with ICT as the secondary contractor). KD-50-I is the first Chinese built supercomputer to utilize domestic Chinese CPUs, with a total of more than 330 Loongson-2F CPUs. The size of the computer was roughly equivalent to a household refrigerator and the cost was less than RMB 800,000 (approximately USD $120,000, EURO €80.000 ).

[edit] Loongson 2F

[edit] Loongson 3

The 65nm Loongson 3 (Godson-3) is able to run at a clock speed between 1.0 to 1.2 GHz, with 4 CPU cores (10W) first and 8 cores later (20W), and it is expected to debut in 2010. [8] The first version of the chip will only support DDR2 DRAM, will not have SMT support or a built-in network interface.

[edit] Hardware-assisted x86 emulation

Loongson 3 adds over 200 new instructions to speed up x86 instruction execution at a cost of 5% of the total die area. The new instructions help QEMU translate x86 instructions by lowering the overhead of executing x86/CISC-style instructions in the MIPS pipeline. With additional improvements in QEMU from ICT, Loongson-3 achieves an average of 70% the performance of executing native binaries while running x86 binaries from nine benchmarks. [9]

[edit] Godson microprocessor specifications

Name Model Frequency
[MHz]		 Architecture
Version		 Year Cores Process
[nm]		 Transistors
[millions]		 Die size
[mm^2]		 Power
[W]		 Voltage
[V]		 L1 Dcache
[k]		 L1 Icache
[k]		 L2 Cache
[k]		 Performance
[SPEC2000]
Godson-1 1 200 MIPS 32-bit 2002 1 180 -- -- 1 -- 8 8 none 19/25
Godson-2 2B 250 MIPS-III 64-bit 2003 1 180 -- -- -- -- 32 32 none 52/58
Godson-2 2C [10] 450 MIPS-III 64-bit 2004 1 180 13.5 41.5 -- -- 64 64 none 159/114
Godson-2 STLS2E 1000 MIPS-III 64-bit 2006 1 90 47 36 7 1.2 64 64 512 503/503
Godson-2 STLS2F 1200 MIPS-III 64-bit 2007 1 90 51 43 5 1.2 64 64 512 --
Godson-3 STLS3? 1000 MIPS-III 64-bit 2009 4 65 400+ -- 10 -- 64 64 4096 --
Godson-3b STLS3? 1000 MIPS-III 64-bit 2010? 4+4 65 -- -- 20 -- 64 64 4096 --
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

[edit] Major events

Development of the first Loongson chip was started in 2001.

On June 25th 2008, Hu Weiwu (chief designer of Loongson processors) gave a keynote speech at ISCA 2008, held in Beijing. The topic of the speech was "Research and Development of Godson processors".[11].

[edit] Supported software

Unlike processors from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices or Via Technologies, Loongson does not support the x86 instruction set. The processor's primary operating system is Linux, while in theory any OS with MIPS support should also work. For example, Windows CE was ported to a Loongson-based system with minimal effort. [12]

Linux distributions that work on Loongson:

[edit] Compiler support

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is the primary compiler for software development on the Loongson platform. Loongson specific tunings are added in GCC 4.4, [13] the -march=loongson2f and -mtune=loongson2f flags can be used to enable those optimizations.

ICT also ported Open64, the advanced optimizing compiler, to the Loongson II platform. [14]

[edit] User applications

Open source applications on Linux platform can be ported with little effort. Most common open source applications (including OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, Pidgin, and MPlayer) and applications written for the Java platform are supported. [15]

[edit] Loongson-based systems

Lemote's Fulong MiniPC on the top of a CD-ROM drive as reference

In March 2006, a €100 Loongson II computer design called Longmeng (Dragon Dream) was announced by Lemote.

In June 2006 at Computex'2006, Taipei YellowSheepRiver company has announced the Municator YSR-639, a small form factor computer based on the 400 MHz Loongson 2.

Currently, Loongson boxes that come with a 667 MHz Godson 2E processor or a 800 MHz Godson 2F processor are sold in China at CNY1599 (~US$200) or CNY 1800 respectively without monitor, mouse, or keyboard.

As of July 2008 two manufacturers have announced Loongson 2F products for sale outside China.

  • First a Dutch company (Van der Led) announced a 8.9" subnotebook under the name of Jisus on April 2008[16] but as of September 2008 no one has gotten any device or answer from them, the product is no longer on their catalogue, and in the blogosphere it has been labeled as scam.[citation needed]
  • The French company EMTEC announced[17] in June 2008 a 10" subnotebook under the brand name Gdium[1] for "less than 399€" running Mandriva Linux and available for sale in September in Europe, US and China. As opposed to the before mentioned scam, EMTEC has already shown the devices in public events[18], and is reaching out to the developer community through the "one laptop per hacker" program [19].

As of November 2008 the new 8.9" netbook from the Chinese manufacturer Lemote that replaced mengloong, Yeeloong (Portable Dragon)[20], running Debian GNU/Linux, is available[21] in Europe at the Dutch company Tekmote Electronics.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2006-11-20/00141245061.shtml 龍芯處理器英文品牌定名Loongson
  2. ^ http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2006/0626/202602.html China's Microprocessor Dilemma
  3. ^ http://www.mips.com/news-events/newsroom/index.cfm?i=1403 MIPS Technologies Licenses MIPS64 Architecture to STMicroelectronics
  4. ^ http://www.st.com/stonline/stappl/cms/press/news/year2007/t2154.htm China’s Institute of Computing Technology and STMicroelectronics announce their cooperation on the Loongson processors
  5. ^ http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2008/1103/224401.html Godson-3 Emulates x86
  6. ^ http://www.mips.com/news-events/newsroom/?i=43093 China’s Institute of Computing Technology Licenses Industry-Standard MIPS Architectures
  7. ^ KD-50-I Home page
  8. ^ China readies first multicore Godson CPUs (EETimes, Aug. 27, 2008)
  9. ^ "Godson-3: A Scalable Multicore RISC Processor with x86 Emulation". IEEE. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MM.2009.30. Retrieved on 2009-04-16. 
  10. ^ "cpu". http://www.lemote.com/english/cpu.html. 
  11. ^ Main program of ISCA 2008
  12. ^ 福瓏電腦WinCE 5.0 圖片
  13. ^ MIPS LS2 Scheduling and tuning
  14. ^ Open64 on MIPS: porting and enhancing Open64 for Loongson II
  15. ^ http://www.lemote.com/english/technology.html
  16. ^ Jisus subnotebook's Announcement (LinuxDevices, Apr. 08, 2008)
  17. ^ Gdium subnotebook's Announcement (June 4, 2008)
  18. ^ Gdium in a fair at Berlin
  19. ^ OLPH
  20. ^ Yeelong Specs (LinuxDevices, Oct. 22, 2008)
  21. ^ Yeelong 8.9" netbook at tekmote.nl for 335.50€

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