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
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
Not socketed, soldered down chips. Custom architecture.
For a moment I got excited of the return of multiple CPU vendors sharing motherboards à la Cyrix and VIA.
They've (they being the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which designs these) come a long way but still are behind after all these years. And most of these years were unimpeded progress. The impact of the sanctions still has yet to be measured.Yeah and also, they have a habit of inflating performance specs a bit.Sorta. Supposedly the x86_64 emulation performance is quite good, like 80% of original speed good, due to use of pretty blatantly ripped off instructions solely for "emulation use only").
I've never tested that figure though.
Here is a real world analogy, anyone with an internet connection can get online and learn how nuclear weapons work. But despite the fact that everyone has the access to the information that makes them work, there are only a few countries in the world that can actually build one.
It's the building part that is hard, not the designs.
They can achieve 7nm process by their own,but it's clear and undoubt that they can't make their own lithography machine(they can make it,but just for 45nm process) and some important raw.They may attain it in an illegal way.