The latest from China, Lingjiu Micro GP201, is a step towards homegrown alternatives

At a time when China is aiming to reduce reliance on Western powers for PC hardware, the emergence of the Lingjiu Micro GP201 GPU is a good sign. It’s one of the many domestic alternatives being fostered by the government.

While the GPU isn’t high-performance by any of the current standards, it’s still a significant feat, given that the company behind the product, Wuhan Lingjiu Microelectronics, developed it within three years of inception, reports Tom’s Hardware.

Another reason that Lingjiu Micro GP201 is getting all the attention is that it’s far ahead of its competitors in the national landscape.

The manufacturer is comparing GP201 with AMD E8860 to highlight how the former outperforms AMD products, but let’s not forget that the latter was released almost a decade ago in 2014. And it wasn’t even the best-performing GPU of the time!

Wuhan Lingjiu Microelectronics has released five models of the GP201 graphics processing unit covering every segment, namely full-height, half-height, and MXM, according to IT Home.

Lingjiu Micro GP201’s specifications

Core frequency	1200 MHz
Video memory	Supports DDR4, LPDDR4X, and LPDDR4
Data transfer rate	4266Mbps
Supported processors	Loongson, Sunway, Feiteng, Kunpeng, and Haiguang
Supported operating systems	Kirin, Yihui, UOS, VxWorks, Ruihua, and Tianmai
OpenGL support	OpenGL 4.0, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 1.2 / 3.0
Compatible graphics standards	IBM VGA, VESA
Working temperature range	-40 to +85 (temperatures in Celsius)
Power consumption	10W to 30 W

While these configurations may not be optimal for resource-intensive tasks, it’s a sign that China is making steady progress in developing homegrown alternatives.

Recently, China banned Intel and AMD chips from government PCs due to security concerns, and it hopes to be completely non-reliant on Western companies and use only domestic alternatives by 2027.

However, given the fact that the homegrown chips still can’t compete with most of the new-age products, China procured high-end NVIDIA AI chips to train LLMs despite the US banning the sale of such chips to the country.

Do you think the Lingjiu Micro GP201 could compete with the NVIDIA and AMD chips after future upgrades? Share with our readers in the comments section.