Loongson 3A6000 On Par With the Intel i3-10100, Chips Are Taped Out & Ready For Manufacturing

Loongson confirms that its next-generation Loongson 3A6000 processor is entering the phase of mass production. The 3A6000 is based on Loongson’s Dragon architecture and makes use of a quad-core configuration. The company claims that this CPU is comparable to the Intel i3-10100, which is quite a feat for the Chinese chip maker.

Loongson 3A6000 Specifications

Let’s talk about the configuration first. The Loongson 3A6000 boasts 4 Cores / 8 Threads and operates at 2.5GHz. Furthermore, the CPU supports 128-bit vector processing extended instructions (LSX) and 256-bit advanced vector processing extended instructions (LASX). In addition, the CPU also has hyperthreading enabled, allowing it to have 8 logical cores.

The memory support includes a dual-channel DDR4-3200 controller. When put up against the 3A5000, the 3A6000 is 60% faster in terms of single-core performance. The multi-core score improvement reaches the triple-digit (100%) territory. All of this has been achieved using the same process node (12nm).

Under the same architecture, we will see the successor to the server-oriented Loongson 3C5000/3D5000. Initial testing puts the new 3C6000/3D6000 (Names are subject to change) CPUs 2x faster than the aforementioned CPUs.

Performance Metrics

The test bench features the Loongson 3A6000 CPU equipped with 8GB of DDR4-3200 memory. The OS is installed on a 256GB NVMe SSD. Speaking of the OS, Loongson has used the Loongnix (V20.4) operating system using the LoongArch64 gcc8.3 compiler (Linux).

In SPEC CPU2006 the single-thread fixed and floating point score reaches 43.1 and 54.6 points respectively. Moving over to the multi-threaded performance, the score increases to 155 for the INT and 140 for the FP tests.

Unixbench sees the 3A6000 score 2284.5 points in the 1 parallel copy and 7438.4 points in the 8 parallel copy benchmark.

Last but not least, the 3A6000 has also been tested in Stream to show the bandwidth results in various scenarios.

Overall, based on these metrics, the 3A6000 comes close to the i3-10100. That is nothing to scoff at since this CPU launched in 2020. The Chinese CPU market is now just 3 years behind the mainstream segment and this gap will only close as time goes by.

Source: Loongson