Chinese Chip Maker Loongson Claims Its CPU's IPC Will Rival AMD's Zen 3 By 2023
The latest announcement out of the country's state-backed Loongson, a CPU manufacturer that's been around for 21 years, was centered on the release of its Godson 3A5000 quad-core and 3C5000 16-core CPUs. These chips aren't particularly impressive compared to the latest processors based on overseas technology, but they're faster than just about anything else designed and produced in China—at least by Loongson's own reckoning.
Loongson itself ran SPEC 2006 on a Ryzen 5 5600G and a Core i7-1165G7 as well as a simulation of its own 3A6000 CPU. The results bear out similar IPC for the three chips, but it's worth noting that the Loongson chip is not expected to clock higher than 3GHz, meaning that the actual realized performance will be much lower than its foreign counterparts. The final performance deficit is largely down to fabrication process, according to Loongson.
Naturally, software support is a concern for any CPU using an unusual instruction set, but Loongson is understandably eager to note that it has basically everything open-source running on its chips, and it also has a translation layer for x86 to LoongArch, though there's no word about how fast it is. Loongson is expecting to release the 3A6000 and 3C6000 CPUs next year, with an MCM 32-core model coming later in the year.
Images courtesy of EET-China
