China Bans Exports of Its Homegrown Loongson Chips

The Chinese government decided to ban the export of microprocessors developed by Chinese fabless company Loongson Technology to all countries.

As the South China Morning Post(Opens in a new window) reports, the export ban has been imposed because the chips are viewed as “strategically important” according to an unnamed source close to the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media. A second unnamed source in the electronics market also confirmed the export ban.

China uses Loongson processors for military and industrial purposes, so it makes sense the government would want to keep them out of the hands of foreign entities.

Loongson architecture chips are seen as China’s equivalent to Intel and ARM. They are based on the MIPS architecture and were first developed at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) before becoming a separate company in 2010. The aim of Loongson Technology is to offer a completely independent alternative to Intel/ARM processors.

Last year, Loongson developed its own instruction set architecture called LoongArch, which is described as being “a bit like MIPS or RISC-V” by Loongson’s Huacai Chen in a post on LWN.net(Opens in a new window). 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available, with the Loongson 3 5000 series being the first to use it. However, benchmarks shared by Phoronix(Opens in a new window) reveal performance is roughly on the same level as an 8th-gen Intel Core i3 chip.

It’s unclear if the timing of the export ban is just coincidence, or meant to show that China can also restrict access to technology just like the US can. However, there’s little use for Loongson processors in the US or Europe, but restricting access will make it more difficult to track how the architecture and performance of future generations of the company’s processors improves.