Wednesday, November 29th 2023
Chinese Loongson 3A6000 CPU Matches Intel "Raptor Lake" IPC
The Chinese chipmaker Loongson has launched its newest desktop processors, the 4-core, 8-thread 3A6000 series, based on the company's LoongArch microarchitecture. We have previously reported that the company wants to match Intel's "Willow Cove" and AMD's Zen 3 instruction per clock (IPC) levels with its 3A6000 CPU series, and today we have the first preview of the performance. Powered by the LA664 cores, 3A6000 is built on a 14/12 nm manufacturing process, with clock speeds going from 2.0 to 2.5 GHz and power consumption of up to 50 Watts. It features 256 KB of L2 cache and 16 MB of L3 cache in total.
While several hardware partners are announcing new Loongson-powered solutions, ASUS China's "Uncle Tony" managed to get his hands on one of them and overclocker the CPU to 2.63 GHz on air cooling. In overclocking tests using liquid nitrogen cooling, a 3A6000 processor reached 3.0 GHz, though there are indications that there is still overhead. In standard out-of-the-box configuration, the 3A6000 performs similarly to Intel's Core i3-10100 four-core CPU, an achievement for Loongson but still behind Intel's latest offerings that clock nearly twice as high. This rapid development of Loongson IP has led to a massive performance increase, matching the IPC of modern CPUs. We are still left to see more information about these 3A6000 series SKUs; however, early benchmarks suggest a significant improvement. You can see the CPU benchmarks below, which include UnixBench and SPEC CPU 2006.
Addditionally, images of the overclocked CPU and ASUS XC-LS3A6M motherboard housing the Loongson 3A600 CPU are listed below.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
While several hardware partners are announcing new Loongson-powered solutions, ASUS China's "Uncle Tony" managed to get his hands on one of them and overclocker the CPU to 2.63 GHz on air cooling. In overclocking tests using liquid nitrogen cooling, a 3A6000 processor reached 3.0 GHz, though there are indications that there is still overhead. In standard out-of-the-box configuration, the 3A6000 performs similarly to Intel's Core i3-10100 four-core CPU, an achievement for Loongson but still behind Intel's latest offerings that clock nearly twice as high. This rapid development of Loongson IP has led to a massive performance increase, matching the IPC of modern CPUs. We are still left to see more information about these 3A6000 series SKUs; however, early benchmarks suggest a significant improvement. You can see the CPU benchmarks below, which include UnixBench and SPEC CPU 2006.
47 Comments on Chinese Loongson 3A6000 CPU Matches Intel "Raptor Lake" IPC
looks like 2500k performance.
chipsandcheese.com/2023/04/09/loongsons-3a5000-chinas-best-shot/Longsoon isn't new and has been around for a long time.
Still would stand by the fact that this is more than enough for usual desktop tasks though.
Yeah looks like a modified MIPS64 ISA with binary translation for x86. I'm assuming these are native benchmarks though, which makes this pretty misleading.
EDIT: Also, I'll believe the numbers when I see them in a Gamer's Nexus video.
Bloomberg Article via Taipei Times (since it's free to read there)
www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2022/05/07/2003777823
Apart from Longsoon you also have Phytium.
www.phytium.com.cn/Indeed.
I am sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
And if AMD/Intel CPU shipments to PRC had slowed notably, say due to the introduction of vast numbers of home-grown CPUs in that market, it would be all over the tech news. Yet there's zero indication this has happened.
As for Longsoon, they seem to be doing ok, they apparently even sell to russia...
Phytium is anyone's guess.
If you look at the specs of this Lognsoon chip, it's 12/14 nm, so well within the abilities of xinese foundries.
Also, don't forget that TSMC still has one 8-inch fab and one 12-inch gigafab in xina, although the latter is apparently only at 28 nm and I can't find any details on the former.I guess we'll just have to wait and see next year when the change is supposed to happen. Considering the motherboard in this news post is apparently from Asus, something is clearly going on, as Asus wouldn't make something like that on a whim.
As most of these home baked chips are running some local version of a Linux based OS, it might not be so strange that there haven't been a drop in AMD/Intel sales, since most people still prefer to use Windows. Also, as this only applies to government agencies, consumers and non government related businesses will continue to use them.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Operating_SystemLongsoon started out with MIPS64 (minus a few modern additions still under patent) and then built on that, so hardly stealing, but obviously not a from the ground up new design either.
Their more recent chips are based on some weird MIPS/RISC-V hybrid architecture.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#Instruction_set_architectures
Love you work by the way. Keep it up!
But i'm pretty certain it will be more than enough to run software a random government worker needs to do his job