Published : 2026-10-13
On 13 October 2001, China's first general-purpose computer central processing unit (CPU), Loongson, was launched. At the time, experts pointed out that although the performance of Loongson was only comparable to the Pentium II from international chip industry giant Intel, it was of great significance for the independent development of the information technology industry and national security because China held the complete intellectual property rights.
The CPU is the heart of a computer system. At that time, as computers in the Chinese market all used foreign CPUs, the country was long described as coreless. However, with the launch of China's Loongson, it was hoped that the foreign monopoly on chip technology could be broken.
Experts believed that Loongson had reached a leading domestic level and an advanced international level in CPU architecture design technology, and had made important innovations in the specific implementation technology of dynamic pipelines and hardware support for system security.
The successful development of Loongson was definitely another major achievement in China's information technology field and would be recorded in the annals of China's information technology development.
Loongson is a general-purpose CPU compatible with the internationally popular MIPS instruction set. It contains over 6 million transistors, can execute more than 250 instructions, can run the latest kernel (version 2.4) of the common, mainstream operating system Linux, X-Windows, and commercialised web server software, and has passed the rigorous tests of SPEC CPU2000 and relevant IEEE standards.
Loongson features a high-performance 64-bit floating-point pipeline, adopts the main design technologies of contemporary advanced general-purpose CPU architectures, operates at a frequency of 12.5 MHz on the logic chip, and its floating-point performance exceeds that of an Intel 486 with a 50 MHz clock speed. It has built-in system security hardware that can defend against a large category of network attacks.
