China’s Loongson Paves Way To Deliver Next-Gen 3A6000 CPUs By 2023, Offer Competitive Performance Against Mainstream Intel Tiger Lake and AMD Zen 3 CPUs
During its recent Innovation Summit held in Nanjing, China, Loongson revealed that the company is working on its next-gen mainstream CPUs for the domestic consumer market which will feature the Dragon core architecture. The core architecture is optimized for Linux operating systems & will be a major deal when it launches next year. The first products to utilize the new architecture will be the fourth-generation family known as the Loongson 3A6000 which is said to offer performance on par or better than Intel’s Willow Cove and the AMD Zen 4 desktop CPUs. The company reiterated that it has completed the design & the CPUs are already in the production phase with the first samples rolling out in the first half of 2023. The actual launch seems to take place around mid of 2023. This new architecture has helped Loongson achieve a 68% growth in single-core (floating-point) & 37% in single-core (fixed-point) performance. For comparison, the company used the SPEC CPU 06 figures of AMD’s Zen 3 and Intel’s 11th Gen (Tiger Lake) CPUs for comparison. The results are listed below:
Loongson 3A6000 - 13/G AMD Zen 3 CPUs - 13/G Intel Tiger Lake - 13+/G Intel Alder Lake - 15+/G
If you look at the numbers above, you will note that the Loongson 3A6000 CPUs will have an IPC that’s equivalent to AMD’s Zen 3 and Intel’s Tiger Lake CPUs which is quite the leap for a Chinese-made domestic processor. Having Zen 3-level of IPC is pretty decent too since Zen 4 just came out and China is already catching up to the last gen. The Chinese CPU company hasn’t mentioned what architecture or clock speeds one should expect but they are targetting both AMD Ryzen and EPYC CPUs based on the Zen 3 core architecture & will utilize the same process as the existing chips. Loongson is targetting the first 16-core 3C6000 chips in early 2023 followed by 32-core variants in mid-2023 while the next generation will follow up a few months later in 2024 with the 7000 lineups, offering up to 64 cores. China’s tech industry isn’t holding back and is offering various products to its consumers that are marketed to rivals AMD, Intel & NVIDIA. China’s BirenTech has showcased a behemoth of an AI chip that is said to offer better performance than NVIDIA’s Ampere A100 GPU while Moore Threads and others are offering mainstream GPUs that try hard to compete against NVIDIA’s mainstream graphics cards. With the recent chip bans, these domestic products will help consumers in China with alternatives however the final performance that they get may not be on par with the offshore rivals. News Sources: MyDrivers,
