China’s Domestic Chip Manufacturer, Loongson, Targets AMD’s Zen 3-Powered Ryzen With Its Next-Gen CPUs By 2023

Hassan Mujtaba
China's Domestic Chip Manufacturer, Loongson, Targets AMD's Zen 3-Powered Ryzen With Its Next-Gen CPUs By 2023

China's Domestic CPU maker, Loongson, has laid out an ambitious plan to reach AMD's Zen 3 level of performance with its next-gen chips.

China's Domestic CPU Manufacturer, Loongson, Claims To Reach AMD Zen 3 Performance With Next-Gen Chips

Last year, Loongson revealed its 3A5000 quad-core CPU lineup that utilizes the Chinese in-house 64-bit GS464V microarchitecture, featuring support for DDR4-3200 dual-channel memory, a primary encryption module, two 256-bit vector units per core, and four arithmetic logic units. Loongson Technology's new processor also operates with four HyperTransport 3.0 SMP controllers that "allow multiple 3A5000s to operate in unison inside a single system.

Related Story AMD Prepping Ryzen 5000XT CPU Refresh For AM4 Budget Platforms, Faster Clocks On Zen 3

More recently, the company announced its brand new 3C5000 CPUs which feature up to 16 cores that also utilizes the proprietary LoonArch instruction set architecture. Loongson also plans to go one step ahead and release a 32-core variant based on the same architecture known as the 3D5000 and it will feature two 3C5000 dies on the same package. So essentially, a multi-chiplet solution.

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But during the unveil, Loongson also unveiled that they plan to launch their next-generation 6000 series chips which will offer a brand new microarchitecture and offer IPC on par with AMD's Zen 3 CPUs. That's a pretty bold claim but for that, we will have to see where the company stands now. In terms of IPC, the Loongson 3A5000 is very competitive in the single-core performance workloads vs a range of ARM chips (7nm) and even an Intel Core i7-10700. Loongson also posted the simulated performance of their next-gen 6000 series CPUs which offer up to 30% higher fixed & 60% higher floating-point performance versus the existing 5000 series chips.

The performance comparison shows a 3A5000 4 core CPU with 2.5 GHz clock speed compared to a Core i7-10700 'Comet Lake' CPU with 8 cores and 2.9 GHz clock speed. The Loongson chip ends up slightly close or better in Spec CPU and Unixbench while getting beaten in the multi-thread tests due to half the cores. Even this tier of performance looks decent considering that due to domestic production, the prices that these chips carry will be very economical for use in China's educational and tech centers.

The 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.

Now you might be wondering, why Zen 3 performance in 2023? The answer is that this is a really big deal for the Chinese domestic tech industry and having a chip that matches Zen 3 in IPC will bring them close to the performance level of modern chips. Plus, AMD has assured that AM4 isn't going away any time soon so Zen 3 may still live on for the foreseeable future.

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.

News Sources: Tomshardware, EET-China

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