You may not be very familiar with Loongson, but the company has been developing computer processors since 2000, and in China the company is widely seen as the granddaddy of domestic CPUs.
The 2002 launch of Loongson 1 was China’s first independently developed general-purpose CPU, using the MIPS III instruction set. in 2020, Loongson switched from the MIPS instruction set to the independent instruction set, LoongArch (which is widely seen as a clone of MIPS). The first LoongArch-supported processor, the 3A5000, debuted in 2021, marking the beginning of the Dragon architecture era of the Loongson ecosystem.
The 3A6000, a follow-on product of the 3A5000, is the second generation processor to use the LoongArch instruction set. Manufactured on a 12nm process, it has four cores and eight threads that can be boosted to 2.5GHz under a TDP of 50 watts. It has a 256 KB L2 cache and a 16 MB L3 cache, and is compatible with DDR4-3200 RAM.
Mixed performance
In a recent video review by Geekerwan (Geek Bay)Loongson’s 3A6000 demonstrated significant advances in its Instructions Per Cycle (IPC), almost on par with the latest architectures from Intel and AMD. While it still lags behind the latest x86 and Arm CPUs in terms of raw performance, its high IPC suggests a promising future, provided Loongson can reach higher frequencies.
In the SPEC 2017 performance test with all CPUs at 2.5 GHz, Loongson’s chip impressed. It outpaced the Zen 3-based Ryzen 9 5950X and was just slightly behind the Zen 4-powered Ryzen 9 7950X and Raptor Lake Core i9-14900K. Tom’s hardware has more about the test results.
However, the 3A6000 can’t really take advantage of its impressive IPC due to its low clock speed and limitations in core count and cache size. The company’s next-generation 3A7000, which is said to use a 7nm process, could improve on these areas, potentially boosting clock speeds and allowing for more cores and more cache.
While the 3A6000 shows significant progress, it still lags behind Intel and AMD performance when operating on quiet frequencies above 5GHz. However, the rapid improvement in Loongson’s architectural design, coupled with its high IPC, suggests a promising future for China’s home-made CPU.