Chinese Loongson CPU takes on AMD’s Zen 3 in benchmarks

Tom’s Hardware reports:

MyDrivers has published a review of Loongson’s 3A6000 quad-core CPU, confirming that the chip’s IPC improvements are real. Benchmarks reveal that the 3A6000 enjoys an impressive 60% performance uplift in single-core performance and an even more impressive 2x performance multiplier in multi-core performance over its 3A5000 predecessor. With these improvements, the 3A6000 features performance comparable to a Core i3-10100F, with the IPC performance of a Zen 3 chip.

Of course, both Intel’s Comet Lake 10th Gen architecture and AMD’s Zen 3 architecture are now coming up on three years old. They’re nowhere near the top of our list of the best CPUs for gaming or other purposes. But it still represents a step in the right direction.

Chinese chipmakers are improving quite fast, but unless they can somehow get access to the latest machinery from the Dutch company ASML, which makes virtually all of the machines capable of producing the chips with the smallest nanometers and is the linchpin in the entire semiconductor industry, they won’t be able to overtake or even match what TSMC and Intel are doing.

That being said, I love weird processors, and I’d love to get my hands on one of these to play around with.