Loongson 3A1000/3A2000/3A3000 Processor Support For GCC

A compiler engineer working for Loongson Technology Co is looking to land a number of improvements to these newer MIPS64 processors into the mainline GCC code-base.

Paul Hua of Loongson Tech sent out a number of patches to improve the GNU Compiler Collection's support for these Chinese MIPS64 CPUs. In particular, the six patches officially add support for the 3A1000, 3A2000, and 3A3000 series processors. Also, there is support for the older Loongson 2K1000 processor series.

The 3A1000 CPUs are nearly a decade old while at least the 3A3000 is their newest shipping model from 2017 and the 3A2000 from three years ago. The Loongson 3A3000 is capable of hitting 1.5GHz across its four cores with this MIPS64R2 processor, is manufactured on a 28nm process, and has about a 30 Watt power rating.

As part of these patches for the 2K1000 / 3A1000 / 3A2000 / 3A3000 processor support is adding support for the Loongson EXTensions R2 (EXT2) instructions.

These six new Loongson CPU patches for the GCC compiler can be found on the gcc-patches mailing list. We'll likely see these Loongson MIPS improvements land in time for the GCC 9.1 release due out in early 2019 as the next feature release.