The war against Ukraine has led the Russian Federation to have major problems in terms of supplying important electronic components such as CPUs, given that the major Western brands, such as AMD or Intel, have decided to stop distributing them official in the area. This, of course, has led to a shortage of processors and undoubted problems in both the private and public spheres. To improve the situation, at the moment the only way forward for Russia, in addition to parallel imports, is to look towards other chips, produced both internally and in still "friendly" countries.
Apparently, Russia will have to give up on supplies of Loongson CPUs, based on the LoongArch microarchitecture, from China, given that the latter has allegedly taken the decision to ban their export to other countries due to their strategic importance to the country's armed forces . The news comes from sources close to the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media interviewed by the economic newspaper Kommersant. In fact, one of them said:
Even if Russian companies are not significantly dependent on the supply of Chinese processors, in the event of a hypothetical blockade of 'parallel imports', they hope to switch to Loongson solutions. The best [Loongson CPUs] are used by the Chinese military-industrial complex, this is the main reason why they are not available for overseas markets.
Credit: HKEPC QeuMaxim Koposov, CEO of Prombit, a Russian manufacturer of PCs that have tried to use non-x86 processors in their systems said:
For the time being, the decision to ban exports of Loongson CPUs to Russia will not cause much damage, as the big plans to deploy Loongson CPUs in Russia most likely have not yet started.
We remind you that Loongson markets two CPU models based on the company's proprietary microarchitecture, LS 3A5000 (quad core for the consumer market) and LS 3C5000 (16 core for servers), which offer, however, performance not comparable to the most modern processors Intel and AMD.