According to Tom’s Hardware Chinese CPU maker Loongson has been showing off its 32-core 3D5000 processor, which follows the philosophy it began with the 3C5000 processor earlier this year. The earlier 3C5000 relies on 16 LA464 cores featuring the company's LoongArch microarchitecture, up to 64MB of cache, and four 64-bit DDR4-3200 memory interfaces with ECC support.

The new 3D5000 takes two 3C5000 CPUs and places it on a single piece of the substrate to build a 32-core processor with eight memory channels. The 32-core processor supports up to 4-way simultaneous multiprocessor configurations and can build a server with up to 128 cores.

Loongson’s CPU consumes 130W at 2.0 GHz or 170W at 2.20 GHz. Loongson's 3D5000 CPU comes in LGA-4129 packaging.

China-based SMIC — which produces processors for Loongson — slowly adopts more advanced nodes, but it is significantly behind market leader TSMC. It will be a while before anyone catches up to AMD or Intel, but the reality is that it does not have to, it just does not have to fall too far behind. It is not consumer devices that are that important at this stage of the game, but servers and super computers and these will fit the bill quite nicely.

Loongson says that its 32-core 3D5000 CPU scores 400 points in the SPEC CPU2006 base test, whereas the result of a 2-way 32-core 3D5000-based machine exceeded 800 points in the SPEC CPU2006 base benchmark. The CPU designer believes that a 4-way machine will hit 1600 points.

Loongson is gearing up to ship samples of its 32-core processors in the first half of 2023, whereas commercial versions will be shipped later.