Hot on the heels of releasing surprisingly competitive new CPUs, Loongson also announced that it is developing a new GPGPU -- but its performance specs fall far below competing GPUs from Nvidia.
With demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) accelerators on the rise as US sanctions severely impact China's access to the fastest GPUs, multiple domestic companies are trying to address the market with specialized processors. Loongson, a prominent CPU developer from China, recently introduced its LG200 accelerator that can process AI, HPC, and graphics workloads, reports El Chapuzas Informático.
At a high level, the Loongson LG200 is a highly parallel processor akin to AI and HPC GPUs by AMD and Nvidia. Loongson's LG200 supports the OpenCL 3.0 application programming interface (API) for compute, which is good enough for high-performance workloads including AI and HPC. It's not enough to run an operating system, but support for OpenGL 4.0 for graphics workloads is good enough for some games.
The block diagram of Loongson's LG200 depicts a processor organized in four clusters, each featuring 16 small ALUs, four bigger ALUs, and one huge ALU or a special-purpose unit. Unfortunately, we cannot draw any conclusions from analyzing the diagram, as it is light on actual technical detail.
Loongson has yet to disclose the specifications of its LG200 processor. We know it supports INT8 data format for AI workloads and probably FP32 and FP64 for graphics workloads, respectively. Also, Loongson claims that the LG200's compute performance is from 256 GFLOPS to 1 TFLOPS per node, though it didn't disclose the precision it used for the metric.
Even if the company used FP64 for its performance claims, the processor is dramatically slower than modern GPUs. For instance, Nvidia's H100 delivers 67 FP64 TFLOPS. That means this GPU could be targeted more at lower-power inference applications.
Loongson calls its LG200 accelerator a "GPGPU," which certainly implies that the part not only supports AI, HPC, and graphics workloads but can also perform general-purpose computing. But we can only wonder what the company means by general-purpose computing. We are unsure if the processor can run an operating system, though OpenCL can be used for certain general-purpose workloads.
