LoongArch CPU Support Begins Landing In LLVM
LoongArch is the new CPU architecture out of Loongson, the company long producing various MIPS64 chips for China's domestic PC market and working well under Linux. LoongArch is based on MIPS64 with some concepts from RISC-V and is China's effort to push along their domestic CPU manufacturing industry without being reliant on other sources.
The Loongson 3 5000 series is their first hardware supporting this ISA. As it stands with the initial hardware and software support, LoongArch performance isn't impressive at this point.
In recent months there has been a lot of work getting up LoongArch's compiler toolchain and Linux kernel support, even when it means in some areas just copying existing MIPS64 code
The milestone achieved today is initial LoongArch ISA support landing within the open-source LLVM compiler stack. The initial patches have been merged while still appears to be a work in progress especially on the code generation front. Loongson engineers are working on this LoongArch compiler support themselves, similar to the work they are doing for GCC.
Most open-source projects have been receptive to LoongArch support being added while we will see over the longer-term how viable (and performant) this CPU architecture is and how well it can compete with x86_64, Arm, RISC-V, etc and whether there ends up being any notable use of the ISA outside of China.
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