Chinese chipmaker Loongson has long promised that its next-generation 3A6000-series processors based on the LoongArch microarchitecture will match AMD's Zen 3 CPUs in terms of instructions per clock (IPC) performance. This week the company disclosed (via @9550pro) some of the actual test results of its quad-core 3A6000 processor and said that they were comparable to Intel's quad-core '10th-Gen Core' processor from 2020. But there's a catch.
"Based on the relevant test results, the overall performance of the Loongson 3A6000 processor is comparable to that of Intel's 10th generation Core quad-core processor launched in 2020," a statement by Loongson reads.
Loongson's quad-core 3A6000 processor has a 2.50 GHz clock rate. The chip hit 43.1/54.6 points in the SPECint_base2006/SPECfp_base2006 benchmarks, as well as 155/140 in SPECint_rate_base2006 (8 copies)/SPECfp_rate_base2006 (8 copies), at least according to the tests conducted by Saixi Laboratory of the China Institute of Electronic Technology Standardization.
However, SPEC discontinued its SPEC 2006 CPU benchmark in 2018, making it impossible to compare Loonson's performance numbers to independently obtained results approved by SPEC. Meanwhile, the new 3A6000 is noticeably faster than its predecessor, based on previously published test results of the quad-core 3A5000 at 2.50 GHz.
The same institute also tested the CPU in UnixBench v5.1.3 and got a 2284.5 single-thread score and 7438.4 eight-thread score. If Intel Core i7-10750H's UnixBench performance numbers published in a Reddit post are to be believed (1713 single-thread, 8248 12-thread), then the 3A6000 indeed outpaces Intel's six-core Comet Lake at 2.60 GHz when it comes to single-thread workloads at around the same clock, but falls behind a six-core CPU with SMT enabled. It's noteworthy that Intel's Comet Lake uses Skylake cores from 2015.
According to Loongson, its 3A6000-series processors employ a brand-new 6-way multiple-issue Dragon microarchitecture that is significantly more efficient than its predecessor. Meanwhile, the company has so far published the results of its 3A6000 CPU at 2.50 GHz and has not disclosed the final clocks of the actual processors that are due to ship several months from now.
To that end, it is too early to draw any conclusions about the performance of Loongson's upcoming processors. On the one hand, it looks like the 3A6000 is faster than the 3A5000 at the same clock in the discontinued SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark, but that's based on results published by the company itself. The chip also seems to be faster than its predecessor and Intel's Skylake in UnixBench at 2.50 – 2.60 GHz.
Since there are no independently obtained benchmark results of the 3A6000, we cannot really say whether or not Loongson has succeeded in developing a microarchitecture that matches AMD's Zen 3 in terms of IPC performance or not.
