China's best consumer x86 CPUs are still miles behind Intel and AMD in terms of performance.
It's not common to encounter Loongson class CPU systems outside of China, but fortunately, one of the Linux reviewer sites somehow manages to get its hands on one of the CPU maker's 12 core CPUs to run some requisite benchmarks. The CPU by Phoronix, one of the reviewers, is from the CPU maker's 3B6000 series, a 12 core CPU running a plethora of Linux based benchmarks. However, even though this CPU boasts a dozen cores, it still cannot even begin to approach modern Western six core chips like the Ryzen 5 9600X.
It seems it was delivered over to the Linux based store thanks to the Loongson Hobbyists Community. It was bundled with a 3B6000x1-7A2000x1-EVB Micro ATX board, which has two DIMM slots, one M.2 slot, two PCIe x16 slots, as well as a small handful of USB ports.
They have also tested it against previous results with the help of their Phoronix test suite, and they have tested it with many different programs, many of which support AVX 512. The 3B6000 scores nearly last place, being three times worse than AMD's six core Ryzen 5 9600X processor. The only processor it was able to beat was a quad-core ARM processor, such as the Raspberry Pi 500.
Nevertheless, it should be noted here that the 3B6000 did not lag in all the applications used in the benchmarking tests conducted by Phoronix. This is, for example, evidenced in the application called C-Ray 2.0, where the 3B6000 could deliver performance at par with the Ryzen 5 9600X, while in the OpenSSL 3.6 application, it did nearly at par with the performance of the Core Ultra 5 245K. The 3B6000 did perform better than the 245K but at par with the Core Ultra 9 285K in the QuickSilver 20230818 application. All the other tests saw the 3B6000 lag behind all the x86 processors offered by AMD and Intel.
The said performance results aren't surprising at all. This is because the 3B6000 has a processing speed of just 2.5GHz, half the clock speed of the latest CPUs by Intel and AMD. The LA664 CPU architecture of the Chinese CPU has the IPC of Zen 3 architecture but is handicapped by its extremely slow clock speed.
However, it is working on new CPU architecture that will be significantly faster than what is currently offered by the 3B6000 and its associated LA664 CPU architecture. Last year, we heard that the Chinese CPU maker was working on a new LA864 architecture that is said to potentially have 13th/14th Gen Raptor Lake performance from Intel CPUs. Additionally, this CPU architecture is said to have better clock speeds of 3 to 3.5GHz. This is, of course, far from what Intel and AMD's CPUs can do, which is 5+ GHz, but this is a huge improvement for the Chinese CPU maker.
👉🏻 Found this article interesting? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and whatsapp to read more exclusive content we post.
