Guess what is ready for tape out

It has a MIPS core and a GPU from Vivante…

Yes, you are absolutely right. We are talking about Longson 2H – formerly known as Godson 2H. There is no difference between Godson and Longson – it’s just that Godson is the academic name, whereas Longson is the commercial name.

Longson is a commercial spin-off from ICT – an institute under The Chinese Academy of Sciences. This chip should be seen as a direct competitor to chips from both ARM and Intel.

Longson 2H is a SoC that includes CPU core, graphics core, memory controller as well as the traditional south bridge functionality all in one chip. And it is set to tape out in a few weeks. The CPU core in Longson 2H is the same as in 2G, which means that we are talking about a 4-way superscalar core with out-of-order execution based on the MIPS64 instruction set. It runs a variety of operating systems, but will mainly be using Red Flag Linux, a Chinese distribution.

The core consumes 4W at 1 GHz and includes 64/64KB L1 cache and 512KB level 2 cache.  In addition there is a graphics core based on technology that has been licensed from Vivante. This is a mobile architecture that has been designed withpower saving in mind, but nonetheless is capable of 1080p playback.

According to Weiwu Hu, the president of Longson, they chose the Vivante GPU because it takes up less space than other designs while delivering the same performance.  Once again, letting efficiency win out.

The shader architecture is a unified vertex and fragment/pixel shader, which means no wasted GPU cycles Full OpenGL ES 2.0 Shading Language support for unrestricted programmability. On top of that there is IEEE 32-bit high-precision computing. The GPU is designed to be massively parallel multi-threading virtually eliminates graphics bottlenecks.

On the texture side there is support, which includes 2D, Cubic environment, Projective, YUY2, and High Dynamic Range (HDR) Point sample, bi-linear, and tri-linear texture filters. Depth map is up to 24-bit compressed texture standards ETC1 and DXT1-DXT5 dependent texture operation with high performance. There is support for up to 16 vertex textures and 16 pixel textures simultaneously Supports texture size up to 8K x 8K.S|A

Correction: 512MB is properly 512KB.

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