China's Loongson Unveils New Server Processor That Rivals Intel's 10nm Ice Lake Chips
Chinese chipmaker Loongson has officially announced its new line of server processors, the 3C6000 series. These new processors boast between 16 and 64 cores and offer significant performance improvements over the previous generation, with up to 100% gains in some scenarios.
The base model, the Loongson 3C6000, comes equipped with 16 cores and 32 threads, support for DDR4-3200 RAM, and 64 PCIe Gen4 lanes. Loongson plans to release several variants, including the LS3D6000 with two interconnected chips (32 cores / 64 threads) and the LS3E6000 with four chips (64 cores / 128 threads).
According to Loongson's internal benchmarks, the 3C6000 shows a 60-95% improvement in SPEC CPU 2017 scores compared to the previous generation 3C5000. In UnixBench tests, the new processor outperforms its predecessor by up to 33% in single-core and a whopping 100% in multi-core performance.
Furthermore, the 16-core Loongson 3C6000 reportedly outperforms the 16-core Intel Xeon Silver 4314, while the 32-core LS3D6000 surpasses the Intel Xeon Gold 6338 with the same core count. This indicates that Loongson is significantly closing the gap with industry leaders Intel and AMD, reaching performance levels comparable to their chips released in 2021.
The base Loongson 3C6000 is scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of this year, with the more powerful variants expected to launch in 2025.
