Hu Weiwu: The 3A3000 is the Jinan Campaign in the CPU field, marking the beginning of the strategic counteroffensive for self-developed chips.

On August 17, Loongson Technology's Chairman Hu Weiwu published an article in the "Core Journey" series, reviewing the development history of the Loongson 3 CPU. He compared the Loongson 3A3000, successfully developed in 2016, to the Jinan Campaign in the CPU field, believing that the prelude to a strategic counteroffensive for independent chips had begun.

The 3A3000 was successfully developed in October 2016 and was named CZ80 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Red Army's Long March victory that year, with the letters "CZ80" etched onto each chip's silicon wafer. According to available information, Loongson series chips have consistently been named after major historical events; the 2006 Loongson 2E was named CZ70 for the 70th anniversary of the Long March victory.

Public data shows that the 3A3000 is based on a 28nm process with a main frequency above 1.5GHz. Under GCC compilation, its SPEC CPU 2006 (international standard processor performance benchmark) single-core fixed-point and floating-point scores exceeded 11 and 10 points respectively, with STREAM memory access scores exceeding 13GB/s. The overall SPEC score improved by about 60% compared to the previous generation 3A2000.

Hu Weiwu stated that the 3A3000's single-core performance crossed the first threshold of international general-purpose processor performance, no longer falling short of high-end ARM server processors, Intel Atom series, and VIA processors, while its memory access bandwidth matched that of AMD and Intel Core series.

It should be noted that the 3A3000's development received no national project subsidies and was entirely self-funded by Loongson Company. Hu Weiwu said that after crossing the first threshold, the 3A3000 laid a solid foundation for achieving performance comparable to mainstream Intel and AMD processors in the next step.

Following the 3A3000, the Loongson team launched the quad-core 3A4000 in December 2019, adopting a 28nm process with the main frequency increased to 1.8GHz-2.0GHz, and a single-core SPEC CPU 2006 score exceeding 20 points.

The Loongson research group was established in 2001, and the Loongson 1 chip successfully completed tape-out in 2002, marking this year as its 25th anniversary.