STMicroelectronics ships Longsoon outside of China

Longsoon is a processor which have only been available in China up till now. It’s a superscalar 64-bit processor which is compatible with the current MIPS64 standard. Thus not a threat to neither AMD’s nor Intel’s x86 processors, since you have to use a UNIX/Linux system instead of Windows. Still, Longsoon is quite interesting as it has proven to display some very impressive performance (equal to PIII/P4) and a very low power consumption, something the rest of the world will now be able to enjoy through the cooperating between STMicroelectronics and The Institute of Computing Technology (at the Chinese Academy of Sciences). The first processor to reach outside of China will be Longsoon-2E, a 1GHz processor made with 90nm process.