You may not be very familiar with Loongson, but it has been developing computer processors since 2000, and in China the company is widely considered the grandmother of domestic CPUs.
The release of Loongson 1 in 2002 was the first independently developed general-purpose CPU in China, using the MIPS III instruction set. In 2020, Loongson moved from the MIPS instruction set to its standalone instruction set, LoongArch (which is widely considered to be a clone of MIPS). The first LoongArch-compatible processor, the 3A5000, debuted in 2021, ushering in the Dragon architecture era of the Loongson ecosystem.
The 3A6000, a successor product to the 3A5000, is the second generation processor using the LoongArch instruction set. Manufactured on a 12nm process, it has four cores and eight threads capable of boosting to 2.5 GHz with a TDP of 50 watts. It has a 256 KB L2 cache and a 16 MB L3 cache, and supports DDR4-3200 RAM.
Unpredictable performance
In a recent video review by Geekerwan (Geek Bay), Loongson's 3A6000 demonstrated substantial progress in its instructions per cycle (IPC), nearly on par with the latest architectures from Intel and AMD. While it still lags behind the latest x86 and Arm CPUs in raw performance, the high IPC suggests a promising future, provided Loongson can reach higher frequencies.
In the SPEC 2017 floating-point and integer performance test with all CPUs locked to 2.5 GHz, the Loongson chip impressed. It surpassed the Zen 3-based Ryzen 9 5950X and fell slightly behind the Zen 4-powered Ryzen 9 7950X with Raptor Lake Core i9-14900K. Tom Hardware has more information 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 rumored to use a 7nm process, can improve on these points, potentially increasing clock speeds and allowing for more cores and more cache.
While the 3A6000 demonstrates considerable progress, it still lags behind the performance of Intel and AMD when operating at quiet frequencies above 5 GHz. However, the rapid improvement in Loongson's architecture design, coupled with its high IPC , suggests a promising future for China's homemade CPU.
