China’s Loongson claims its newest CPUs are a match for Intel’s Tenth-gen in single-core efficiency

In short: Beijing was the setting for some daring claims from Loongson this week about its homegrown processor lineup. The Chinese language tech agency says it has leveled up its CPU mental property in an enormous means, with out counting on any third-party sources. It is an bold purpose to tackle the heavyweights of x86 and Arm with its “Dragon” structure.

Loongson Vice President Zhang Ge revealed that the corporate has made large strides in single-core efficiency by way of its R&D efforts. Whereas admitting that its chips lag mainstream choices in multi-core grunt, Loongson claims its newest iterations have seen as much as a 20x acquire in single-core capabilities.

The newly-launched 3B6600 and 3B7000 processors had been proven off as examples of this progress. The mobile-focused 3B6600 packs eight LA864 cores ticking at 3 GHz together with built-in “LG200” graphics. In the meantime, the doubtless desktop-bound 3B7000 is slim on particulars apart from a lift as much as 3.5GHz clock velocity and trendy interfaces like PCIe 4.0, SATA 3.0, USB 3.0, GMAC, and HDMI help.

The built-in GPU entrance can also be getting an overhaul at Loongson. Its new graphics structure will help OpenGL 4.0, OpenCL 3.0, and debut with INT8 tensor cores to speed up AI workloads. The iGPU itself tops out at a decent 256 GFLOPS, whereas a discrete card utilizing the identical GPU might attain a hefty 1 TFLOP of compute energy for intensive duties.

Final 12 months noticed the launch of Loongson’s 3A6000 chip, a quad-core CPU at 2.5GHz. Efficiency benchmarks from a Chinese language testing company purportedly put it on par with 2020’s Intel Tenth-gen quad-core CPUs. The 3A6000 makes use of Loongson’s LoongArch ISA derived from MIPS, attaining scores like 43.1/54.6 in single-thread SPEC exams and 7400 in Unixbench.

If Loongson’s efficiency claims show correct, these chips might make a severe dent in China’s reliance on international silicon from the likes of Intel, AMD, Arm, and Nvidia.

With the Chinese language authorities already blocking Intel/AMD products in some key sectors and aggressively pushing home chip alternate options, Loongson’s homegrown options have the potential to proliferate within the profitable schooling and authorities markets. We might even see these CPUs and GPUs begin hitting mainstream shopper PCs throughout China earlier than lengthy.