The US sanctions on China do not only prevent the arrival of the most advanced lithography equipment that ASML, Tokyo Electron or Canon have to the plants of chip manufacturers in the country led by Xi Jinping; They also hinder the arrival of the most advanced processors that have NVIDIA, Intel or AMD, among other companies. This situation has forced Chinese CPU designers to step on the accelerator and develop their own general-purpose chips and for artificial intelligence applications.
Loongson is one of the most capable Chinese processor designers. We have been tracking it for months because in the current climate of geopolitical tension it has become more relevant than ever, and there is no doubt that its cruising speed is high. At the end of December 2022, this company launched its 32-core 3D5000 CPU, a general-purpose processor with LoongArch microarchitecture implemented by this company on the MIPS architecture. But since then he has not rested on his laurels.
The LS3C6000 processor is a little beast for servers
Loongson already has its new LS3C6000 processor ready, a general-purpose CPU for servers implemented on the LoongArch instruction set and equipped with 16 LA664 cores. Nothing really surprising so far. The picture begins to get interesting if we notice that, according to Loongson, the microarchitecture of this chip allows it to deliver performance comparable to that of an AMD processor equipped with the same number of Zen 3 cores.
The LS3C6000 processor is implemented on the LoongArch instruction set and equipped with 16 LA664 cores.
It is evident that it is most prudent for us to approach this statement with some suspicion given that Loongson is an interested party. And, furthermore, at the moment no independent media has published its own analysis of this processor. Even so, it is not at all unreasonable to accept that this company actually already has a microarchitecture capable of going head-to-head with AMD’s Zen 3. In any case, we have not yet investigated the most impressive feature of this development of this Chinese company.
And the cores of the LS3C6000 CPU are interconnected using high-performance links that Loongson has named DragonChain. On paper, this technology will allow this company to scale this CPU and launch new versions in the short term. equipped with 32 or 64 cores.
Additionally, Loongson is confident that its LoongArch 6000 microarchitecture will allow it to match the IPC (instructions per clock cycle) of AMD’s Zen 3 processors. Although this is true, it will still be one step behind Intel and AMD, but there is no doubt that for this Chinese company it will be a success to reduce the distance that separates it from the most advanced designs that its American competitors have.
