China has reportedly banned the export of its own Loongson processors to Russia. The decision was made after the Chinese government recognised the technology as strategically important for its use in the country's military-industrial complex, Russian officials were cited by local agencies as saying.
Russia had been considering using Loongson processors as an alternative to parallel imports of Intel products, which could be blocked by further US sanctions.
A representative from the Russian Ministry of Digital Development was quoted by Kommersant as saying a number of Russian electronics manufacturers have already tested Chinese processors, but they are no longer able to order a new batch for further testing.
Loongson is a family of general-purpose, MIPS architecture-compatible microprocessors developed by Chinese fabless company Loongson Technology. The processors are also known as Godson processors, and moved to their own processor instruction set architecture (ISA) in 2021 to make the company and China less dependent on foreign technology or authorisation to develop their processor capability.
The Chinese government's decision to ban exports is a step towards China's long-term goal of achieving semiconductor self-sufficiency, particularly its use in military tech. Loongson's next-generation Godson CPU, the 3A6000, is expected to sample with customers in the first half of 2023, with a potential launch later in the year.
Loongson has claimed that the 3A6000 will provide performance on par with AMD's Ryzen 5000 and Intel's 11th-Gen Core CPUs. Simulation test results show that the 3A6000 will improve single-core fixed-point performance by 37% and single-core floating-point performance by 68% compared to the previous-generation 3A5000.
If the 3A6000 lives up to Loongson's claims, it would still be significantly behind the latest x86 processors from Intel and AMD. However, the claims also demonstrate China's progress in processor technology based on the homegrown LoongArch ISA. The company has previously claimed that its chips include circuitry for emulation and binary translation of non-Loongson ISAs such as x86 and Arm.
Homegrown chips have become increasingly important to China as the country deals with a growing stack of export restrictions from the US, including a block on semiconductor equipment that could be used to make logic chips with a 16nm process or smaller, DRAM chips at 18nm or smaller, and NAND flash with 128 or more layers.
