Loongson, the China-based chipmaker, recently laid claim that its newly launched 3B6600 and 3B7000 processors are on par with Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs. That is, on a single-core performance level, at least.
Specs-wise, the Loongson 3B6600 is a mobile-focused processor, packing eight LA864 cores that run at 3GHz, and also features LG200 integrated graphics. The 3B7000, meanwhile, is the desktop CPU that features the same number of cores and reportedly has a boost clock of 3.5GHz. There’s not a whole lot of details about this CPU, other than the fact that it should support the modern interfaces, including PCIe 4.0, SATA 3.0, USB 3.0, and so on.
Circling back to the LG200 integrated GPU, it too is reportedly getting a bump up in performance, with support for OpenGL 4.0, OpenCL 3.0, and support for INT8 tensor cores, to accelerate AI workloads. Performance-wise, Loongson claims that the new iGPU should eke out a respectable 256 GFLOPs. Again, these are just claims but if they are true, then this could serve as a significant step in reducing its home country’s reliance on western chips, including Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and ARM.
Technically, Loongson first came into the spotlight back in 2021, amidst a surge of Chinese patriotism and its home country announcing that it wanted to reduce its reliance on 3rd party silicon, and make its own homegrown chips. The company was also added to the US Department of Commerce’s Entity List, which essentially blacklists the company, after it was accused of obtaining US-made technology on behalf of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
(Source: Techspot, Tom’s Hardware)
