14 DAY TRIAL // After being confined to the server and embedded market space for quite some time now, China's Loongson processors based on the MIPS architecture will soon make their way into the consumer market, as the first notebooks to be powered by these chips are expected to enter mass production in August.
A prototype of this notebook was spotted by a member of a Chinese forum, who has provided us with the first specifications and pictures of the device.
From the information that is available at this time we know that the Loongson CPU used by this laptop features quad processing cores and that is comes paired with an AMD RS780 north bridge.
Graphics is handled by an integrated R600 core found inside AMD's controller and fully supports DirectX 10.1.
The system is setup to run a special distribution of Linux which mimics the Windows interface and the system is pictured running various videos, including a HD version of the Big Buck Bunny animation.
Sadly, from the pictures provided is hard to make an idea about the performance of the Loongson processor, especially considering that the AMD GPU is optimized to hardware accelerate video playback.
The clocks speed and power requirements of the Chinese CPU are also unknown at this point in time.
For the last couple of years ICT, an institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been working on developing the Loongson CPU, which is based on a 4-way superscalar core with out-of-order execution and support for the MIPS64 instruction set.
This is paired together with 200 instructions meant to accelerate x86 emulation and the CPUs are designed to run the Red Flag Linux distribution.
As noted earlier, the Loongson powered notebook is scheduled to enter mass production in August, but its launch date is not yet known.
