China's Loongson Looks To Mainline LoongArch Support In LLVM

Not only is Loongson working on bringing up LoongArch ISA support for the GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain components, but the Chinese company has now laid out their plans for LoongArch on LLVM.

Loongson has been very busy this year bringing up LoongArch, their new downstream of the MIPS CPU architecture. They have been working on porting the Linux kernel to LoongArch as well as the open-source code compilers and related components for what they aim to be a Chinese domestic high performance CPU. Current LoongArch-based 3A5000 CPU benchmarks are not so impressive but will be interesting to see how this new MIPS-based architecture evolves.

On Wednesday a Loongson engineer laid out their plans for LLVM. Since 2020 they have been working on LLVM support and initially were targeting an older release. They have since been refactoring their LoongArch port against LLVM Git while also making improvements to their test coverage and improving the coding standard. But they are hoping to improve this code incrementally after the initial upstreaming into LLVM's repository.

After a lot of LoongArch work publicly over the past few months and even longer internally, it will be very interesting to see how the open-source/Linux support plays out moving into 2022 and what Loongson manages to achieve on the hardware side with future LoongArch CPUs whether they can suitably take on the likes of Intel and AMD or simply the best of what they have to offer for a domestically produced CPU -- just like Russia's Elbrus CPU.