The first Chinese CPU instruction specification is released - LoongArch Infrastructure Manual

In mid-April, Loongson officially announced that the infrastructure of the Loongson autonomous instruction system architecture (Loongson Architecture, hereinafter referred to as Loongson Architecture or LoongArch) passed the evaluation of a well-known domestic third-party intellectual property evaluation agency and was officially released to the public at the main forum of the 2021 Information Technology Application Innovation Forum.

It is worth noting that unlike previous Intel/AMD's x86, Arm, RISC, MIPS, and SPARC instruction set specifications, LoongArch is the first CPU specification written in Chinese.

The Loongson architecture was launched by Loongson Technology based on 20 years of CPU research and ecological accumulation. It includes the infrastructure part and extended parts such as vector instructions, virtualization, binary translation, and nearly 2,000 instructions.

Complete independence, advanced technology and compatible ecology are the three main features of the Loongson architecture.

First of all, from the top-level planning of the entire architecture, to the functional definition of each part, and then to the details of the encoding, name, and meaning of each instruction, the architecture is independently redesigned, and the Loongson architecture has full autonomy.

Secondly, it discarded some outdated contents in the traditional instruction system that were not adapted to the current development trend of software and hardware design technology, and absorbed many advanced technological development achievements in the field of instruction system design in recent years. Compared with the original compatible instruction system, it is not only easier to design high-performance and low-power in hardware, but also easier to compile and optimize and develop operating systems and virtual machines in software.

Third, the design fully considers the compatibility ecosystem needs and integrates the main functional characteristics of various international mainstream instruction systems. At the same time, relying on the Loongson team's more than ten years of technical accumulation and innovation in binary translation, it can not only ensure the lossless migration of binary applications on existing Loongson computers, but also realize efficient binary translation of multiple international mainstream instruction systems.