Loongson has become yet another Chinese GPU designer as it rolled out a new chipset with built-in graphics capabilities for its quad-core 3A5000 and 16-core 3C5000 processors. The new iGPU has capabilities comparable to graphics chips from 2004 ~ 2005, but it offers sufficient performance in office workloads.
Loongson's 7A2000 bridge chip (aka chipset) integrates an OpenGL 2.1/OpenGL ES 2.0-compliant GPU that works at 400 MHz ~ 500 MHz, supporting up to two displays with a 1920x1080@60Hz or 2560x1440x30Hz resolution over two HDMI connections (or an HDMI and a D-Sub/VGA connection).
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The iGPU is said to be an in-house design, and we are not surprised by this since both Arm and Imagination have inexpensive GPU IP blocks that offer a much more sophisticated feature set. However, developing a low-end in-house GPU may make a lot of sense for Loongson.
The 7A2000 chipset is designed for Loongson's 3-series processors that use proprietary LoongArch architecture and therefore require an operating system and software that support this architecture. Instead of rewriting third-party drivers for Loongson's platform, designing a low-end GPU and developing drivers in-house may be easier. At the end of the day, Loongson's customers are various government or local authorities-run organizations that see China-developed IP as a huge benefit even if it is years behind equivalents designed in Europe or the U.S.
Other features of the 7A2000 core logic include PCIe 3.0, SATA 6 Gbps, USB 3.0, GbE PHY, UART, and even GPIO if someone wants to connect something fancy to a Loongson-based platform.
Another notable improvement of the 7A2000 mentioned by Loongson is the fact that the CPU and chipset are now connected using a HyperTransport 3.1 32-bit interface at 3.2 GT/s, which improved PCIe bandwidth by 2.4 times as well as SATA read/write performance by 82%/97% when compared to the previous generation Loongson 7A1000 chipset.
Loongson says that multiple motherboard makers and ODMs have already developed numerous boards featuring a quad-core 3A5000 processor with a 7A2000 chipset and a 16-core 3C5000/3C5000L CPU with a 7A2000 chipset.
