China's homemade CPUs have not been very competitive compared to Western competitors, but that appears to be changing. According to IT Home, a desktop sporting a Hygon C86 3350 CPU was benchmarked by a Bilibili content creator on Geekbench, showing Zen 2 levels of performance.
The chip was benchmarked inside a Tsinghua H880-T3M desktop PC aimed at government and enterprise customers. The unit sports 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and a mysterious 2GB graphics card. Strangely, the Geekbench results say the system has 64GB of memory, so take the RAM rating with a grain of salt. The processor itself is an 8-core SKU featuring a base frequency of 3GHz.
In Geekbench 6.3.0, the Hygon C86 3350 managed a single-core score of 984 and a multi-core score of 5,379 points. The chip's performance is very close to the Ryzen 5 3500 in the same benchmark, particularly its multi-threaded performance. The Ryzen chip features a score of 1,500 points for single-core performance and 5,380 for multi-core performance.
Single-core performance is obviously a weak spot for the Chinese CPU, but its multi-core performance is at least comparable to the Ryzen 5 3500. That might sound generous given that we are comparing an eight core CPU to a six core part, but you'll see in a moment why this is still a performance win for the Chinese chip.
When we last looked at a Hygon CPU, the company barely achieved first-generation Zen performance levels. In fact, this previous chip, with its eight cores, was so bad that it took two of these CPUs (the C86 3185) to outperform the Ryzen 5 5600X in multi-core testing. Even then, the performance gap was not much, given that the two Hygon CPUs had 32 cores combined, compared to the Ryzen 5's six.
The Hygon C86 3350 is a much different story. Its multi-threaded performance is comparable to Zen 2's with almost the same core count. On top of this, it attains this performance level with just a single chip rather than two. This is a big step forward and shows that Hygon is progressing in its CPU development.
Sadly, due to Chinese intervention, getting more details about Hygon's chips is nearly impossible beyond the most basic specifications. However, it is interesting to see how the CPU manufacturer is developing despite its limited scope.
