Loongson (, "
Dragon chip"; academic name:
Godson) is a family of general-purpose
MIPS-compatible
CPU developed at the
Institute of Computing Technology (ICT),
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in the
People's Republic of China. The chief architect is Professor
Hu Weiwu.
Loongson is the result of a
public-private partnership.
BLX IC Design Corporation was founded in 2002 by ICT and Jiangsu Zhongyi Group. Based in
Beijing, BLX focuses on designing the advanced 32/64-bit Loongson general-purpose and embedded processors, together with developing software tools and reference platforms.
ST Microelectronics fabricates and markets Loongson chips for BLX, which is
fabless.
China uses Linux with its Loongson processor family to achieve technology independence.
MIPS patent issues
Loongson's instruction set is
MIPS-compatible, but the internal
microarchitecture is independently developed by
ICT. Early implementations of the family lacked four instructions patented by
MIPS Technologies to avoid legal issues.
In 2007, a deal was reached by MIPS Technologies and ICT. ST Microelectronics bought a MIPS license for Loongson and thus the processor can be promoted as
MIPS-based or
MIPS-compatible instead of...
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