[3] The Godson processors, based on MIPS architecture, were initially developed at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

[7][8] In 2010 the company was commercialized as a separate entity,[5] and in April 2010 Loongson Technology Corporation Limited was formally established and settled in Zhongguancun, Beijing, China.

[9][10] In 2021, Loongson filed for an initial public offering on the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market.

[11] Details from this IPO suggested Loongson had needed RMB 400 million annual funding in its first 10 years of existence and that the company had only broken even in 2015.

[13] In March 2023, the United States Department of Commerce added Loongson to the Bureau of Industry and Security's Entity List for acquisition of American technology to support the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

[citation needed] Early implementations of the family lacked four instructions patented by MIPS Technologies (US4814976A, unaligned load-store) to avoid legal issues.

STMicroelectronics bought a MIPS license for Loongson, and thus the processor can be promoted as MIPS-based or MIPS-compatible instead of MIPS-like.

[8] The binary translation instructions have the specific benefit of speeding up Intel x86 CPU emulation at a cost of 5% of the total die area.

[32] The ISA has been referred to as "a fork of MIPS64r6" due to a perceived lack of changes judging from instruction listings.

[33][34] The Register reported in November 2021 that LoongArch might combine the best parts of MIPS and RISC-V, along with custom instructions.

[39] The Loongson 3 family of processors are "...multi-core CPU[s] designed for high performance desktops, servers and clusters".

[8] The improved microarchitecture core allowed better performance, reportedly 3 times as fast as the 3A1000, as well as introducing the LoongISA enhanced instruction set.

[30] The processor series was Loongson's first with their own developed instruction set architecture (ISA), called "LoongArch".

[30] In April 2023, Loongson launched the 3D5000 processor for data centers and cloud computing, based on the LoongArch instruction set architecture.

[51] The CPU is a monolithic chip with 16 cores; it features the LA664 proprietary MIPS-derived microarchitecture supporting simultaneous multithreading technology (SMT).

According to reports, the CPU's performance supposedly compares to that of Intel's 16-core Xeon Silver 4314 processor, which was released in the second quarter of 2021.

[51] In 2024, Loongson reportedly began its transition to the 7nm process, which was said to potentially provide a 20% to 30% increase in performance to the 3A7000 CPU.

This is partially because of Loongson's status as the only vendor producing application-grade MIPS CPUs for retail.

[56] As of February 2022, there are at least four Chinese Linux distributions that support LoongArch: Kylin, Loongnix, Deepin[57] and Unity Operating System.

[59][60] Before 2021 LLVM support was still inadequate due to missing workarounds for Loongson's CPU errata on MIPS.

[12][8] In March 2006, a €100 Loongson II computer design called Longmeng (Dragon Dream) was announced by Lemote.

[citation needed] In June 2006 at Computex'2006, YellowSheepRiver announced the Municator YSR-639,[75] a small form factor computer based on the 400 MHz Loongson 2.

As of November 2008[update] the new 8.9" netbook from the Chinese manufacturer Lemote that replaced mengloong, Yeeloong (Portable Dragon),[76] running Debian, is available[77] in Europe from the Dutch company Tekmote Electronics.