Loongson
 |
|
| Marketed by | Loongson Technology, Jiangsu Lemote Tech Co., Ltd, Dawning Information Industry, and others |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jiangsu Lemote Tech Co., Ltd |
| Common manufacturer(s) | |
| Max. CPU clock rate | 200 MHz to 1.5 GHz |
| Min. feature size | 180 nm to 28 nm |
| Instruction set | MIPS64 |
Loongson (simplified Chinese: 龙芯; traditional Chinese: 龍芯; pinyin: Lóngxīn; literally: "Dragon Core") is a family of general-purpose MIPS64 CPUs developed at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in China. The chief architect is Professor Hu Weiwu. It was formerly called Godson.
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 64-bit Loongson general-purpose and embedded processors, together with developing software tools and reference platforms.
STMicroelectronics fabricates and markets Loongson chips for BLX, which is fabless.
The current Loongson instruction set is a MIPS64, 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.
In 2007, a deal was reached by MIPS Technologies and ICT. STMicroelectronics bought a MIPS license for Loongson, and thus the processor can be promoted as MIPS-based or MIPS-compatible instead of MIPS-like.
In June 2009, ICT licensed the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures directly from MIPS Technologies.
...
Wikipedia