Chinese chipmaker Loongson’s next-generation 3A6000 series CPUs feature the latest simultaneous multithreading support. Linux 6.5 patch submitted by the company ( phonics). The addition of SMT doubles the number of threads these chips can handle simultaneously.
The SMT implementation in Loongson’s next-generation 3A6000 series processors is similar to AMD’s and Intel’s, allowing a single physical CPU core to handle two threads simultaneously. Therefore, the company’s quad-core 3A6000 processor for client PCs will be able to process 8 threads simultaneously. Meanwhile, Loongson’s datacenter-grade 32-core 3D6000 CPU can handle his 64 threads at once.
“Loongson-3A6000 supports SMT (simultaneous multithreading), and each physical core has two logical cores (threads),” Loongson said. explanation technology reading. “This patch adds support for SMT probes and schedulers via ACPI PPTT.”
In addition to enabling SMT, Loongson’s patch also enables support for the new CPU’s 128-bit Vector Processing Extensions (LSX) and 256-bit Advanced Vector Processing Extensions (LASX). Both LSX and LASX are part of the LoongArch microarchitecture that powers the existing 3A5000 series processors, but I wonder if they were ever enabled and if so what performance benefits they provide. It is unknown if it brought about
Loongson expects its upcoming LoongArch 6000-based CPUs to match AMD’s Zen 3 in terms of instructions per clock (IPC), potentially making Loongson a competitor to leading processor makers. There is a possibility. AMD’s Zen 3, which has comparable IPC performance, is a big achievement for Loongson as existing CPUs lag behind those from AMD and Intel.
However, IPC alone won’t guarantee success and will allow the 3A6000/3C6000/3D6000 processors to compete with their respective AMD Ryzen 5000 series and AMD 3rd Gen EPYC parts, even with comparable core counts. Factors such as clock speed and other platform features such as the memory subsystem greatly affect the final performance. We’ll have to wait until the chip actually appears to find out more.
