Loongson 3A6000 CPU Is Now Ready For China’s Domestic Market: Quad-Core, 2.5 GHz, On Par With 10th Gen Core i3

Loongson has announced the development of its brand new 3A6000 CPU for the domestic China market, offering performance comparable to Intel's 10th Gen Core i3 chips.

The Loongson 3A6000 CPU is based on the company's Dragon core architecture and has been in development for a while now. Last year, the company was hopeful of tackling Intel's 11th Gen & AMD's Zen 3 CPUs which would have been a major advancement for the domestic China market.

In the latest release, Loongson has published the first official specifications of the 3A6000 CPU which features a quad-core design (4C/8T) and an operating frequency of 2.5 GHz. The CPU uses a 4th Generation Dragon architecture which integrates LA664 cores with support for 128-bit vector processing extended instructions (LSX) & 256-bit advanced vector processing extended instructions (LASX) along with SMT2.

The Chinese chipmaker also shared some performance numbers of the chip running with dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory, 256 GB of NVMe SSD, and the Loongnix (v20.4) OS that utilizes the LoongArch64 gcc8.3 compiler (based on Linux). In SPEC CPU2006 (v1.2), the CPU offers a base score of 43.1 in INT and 54.6 in FP. In the Unixbench, the Loongson 3A6000 CPU is able to deliver up to 2284.5 points in the 1 parallel copy and 7438.4 points in the 8 parallel copies benchmark test. The CPU is said to provide more than 60% performance uplift over the 3A5000 CPU using the same process node.

There are also the Stream scores that showcase the overall bandwidth figures of the chip which can be seen below:

According to Loongson, the 3A6000 CPUs are software compatible with the current 3A5000 CPUs and other LoongArch chips. The company also released a patch to support the hyper-threading in the latest chips. The same cores will also be used to power the successors to the server chips with double the performance increment.

Overall, the Loongson 3A6000 CPU is said to be comparable to Intel's 10th Gen Quad-Core CPUs which were launched back in 2020 & that's a good development for the domestic Chinese market.

News Sources: HXL, Mochamad Farido Fanani