Additional information: The 3A6000 reaches a score of 17.24 points per GHz, compared to Intel's chip that typically runs at much higher frequency but the score per GHz ranges between 15-20 points within SPEC CPU 2006. Now the Loongxin Zhongke company can work towards 20 points for the chip.
Currently the company is more focus on producing an energy efficient chip than a higher performance chip that runs at higher frequency, ie. 3 GHz and above.
The company is also planning to tape out its first hybrid (BIG.little) design in the first half of 2024 and the successor to the 3A6000, the 3B6000, is expected to offer four big and four small cores with an advanced iGPU. My guess is this means the 'big' core will run at higher frequency, eg. >3GHz while the 'small' core runs at energy efficient frequency, eg 2.5 GHz. Basically what companies like Intel being doing.
The company will also start development of its next-generation 3A7000 and 3B7000 CPUs which are expected to tackle AMD's Zen 3 and Intel's Tiger Lake offerings by the second half of 2024.
Loongson 3A6000 CPU Is Now Ready For China’s Domestic Market: Quad-Core, 2.5 GHz, On Par With 10th Gen Core i3
Hassan Mujtaba
Aug 1, 2023 03:30 AM EDT
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
