Longsoon 3A6000, the Chinese processor as powerful as a Ryzen 5000

The Chinese manufacturer Loongson Technology presented its new processor 3A6000 which, according to internal tests, would offer the same power as a AMD Ryzen 5000 equivalent. The CPU is currently being tested and the first specimens should be on the market by first half of 2023.

No doubt surprising that a company founded alone 10 years ago and so far focused on embedded solutions has managed to develop an alternative with the same capabilities (on paper) as giants such as AMD or intel. It must be taken into account, in fact, that it is only a generation behind – two in the case of Intel.

However, the Chinese proposal does not support x86 instructions. Unlike its American competitors, LongArch – this is the name of the architecture – uses an instruction set MIPS extension And HEAT which allows you to emulate different systems. The main operating system used by the Chinese solution of course Linuxmore flexible than OS like Windows in this respect.

The chips will be built with a manufacturing process at 12 nm, although it is still unclear who is in charge of production. Loongson, as well as AMD, a fabless company that necessarily had to rely on an external company for the mass production of the CPUs.

While the engineering might not come as a surprise, there is one aspect that inevitably needs to be taken into consideration: The new chip offers a 68 percent improvement in single-core floating point performance over its predecessorthe 3A5000, which was launched on the market only last year.

At the briefing where the CPU was shown, Chief Engineer Weiwu Hu also talked about the 100-core Project. In fact, Loongson also offers solutions for the server sector that are currently limited to 16 cores. The company has already stated that the first solutions a 64 cores won’t arrive until 2025which is why the 100-core CPU program should see fruit in the second half of the decade.

As known, the project funded by the Chinese government aims to reduce dependence on American technologies. In fact, there are numerous emerging companies in China that are engaged in the production of chips and components alternative to those proposed by the big Americans. Although there is still a long way to approach Western proposals, the progress that Chinese industry is making is certainly worthy of interest.