What kind of CPU is Loongson's '3A6000', which is said to be 'China's most promising CPU'?

China is moving away from America and is producing its own CPU. Chips and Cheese, a tech information site, explained about a new CPU called `` 3A6000 '' developed by Chinese company Loongson.

Loongson 3A6000: A Star among Chinese CPUs – Chips and Cheese

3A6000 is a series that uses Loongson's architecture called LA664 and operates at 2.5 GHz quad core. In terms of performance, it is comparable to or not as good as AMD's original Zen architecture (hereinafter referred to as Zen 1), and in benchmarks using 7-Zip file compression, which requires a lot of CPU power, Ryzen 1800X equipped with the original Zen , It is slightly inferior to 4c/8t (4 cores 8 threads), and even 4c/8t 3A6000 cannot compete with Zen 2's Ryzen 3950X, 4c/4t.

However, the 3A6000 delivers a significant 38% performance improvement over Loongson's predecessor, and this improvement becomes even greater when SMT is taken into account. When loading 1 thread per core on 3A6000, 4 LA664 cores are roughly equivalent to 4 Zen 1 cores. However, LA664 operates at 2.5GHz, so although its performance per clock is very good, it cannot catch up to AMD's Zen 3 due to its low clock speed.

Loongson outperforms Zen 1 when benchmarking 4K video encoding. In this regard, Chips and Cheese says, ``The 3A6000 exhibits excellent performance for a 2.5GHz CPU.''

The 3A6000 also performs well in 'branch prediction,' which predicts future processing and reduces waste. In terms of prediction errors per instruction, it is on par with Zen 1, and in terms of accuracy, 3A6000 is on par with Zen 2.

As for cache, both the Zen 2 and 3A6000 feature a large 16MB L3 cache shared by the four cores in the cluster. DRAM latency is 104 nanoseconds, which Chips and Cheese says is still not great, but the cycle count latency is well below the higher clock 3950X.

Chips and Cheese says, 'Creating branch prediction equivalent to Zen 2 is not easy, and Loongson's engineers should be proud. The 3A6000 is part of China's efforts to reduce its dependence on foreign CPUs. Yes, and in that respect the 3A6000 is a good step forward. Zen 1 will still be quite usable in 2024, so Chinese consumers will likely find the 3A6000's performance OK for light daily tasks.Loongson 'Our secondary goal is to become a global CPU manufacturer on a par with Western companies like Intel and AMD, but we still have a long way to go in that respect.'