A server rack featuring two Hygon CPUs has produced disappointing results in Geekbench's new AI benchmark, barely outperforming a nearly 10-year-old quad-core Intel Core i7-6700HQ mobile CPU.
The Hygon CPUs, identified with a CPUID of 900F22, achieved a single-precision score of 1,412, a half-precision score of 531, and a quantized score of 1,523. These processors, operating at a base frequency of 3GHz and paired with 64GB of memory, were outperformed by even older mobile hardware.
Geekbench AI Benchmark Results
| CPU | Single Precision Score | Half Precision Score | Quantized Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dual Hygon 16-core CPUs | 1,412 | 531 | 1,523 |
| Core i7-6700HQ | 1,113 | 589 | 1,394 |
| Ryzen 5 7600X | 3,542 | 1,686 | 6,281 |
Performance Deficit
Compared to the mid-range AMD Ryzen 5 7600X desktop CPU, the Hygon-based server rack was vastly outperformed, demonstrating a 2.5x to 4x performance improvement despite having a fraction of the core count. This performance gap is attributed to Hygon's reliance on AMD's 2017 Zen 1 architecture.
Hygon is unable to utilize newer AMD architectures due to U.S. sanctions, limiting its performance. The company attempts to improve performance by adding more cores and CPUs, but this doesn't address critical issues like single-core performance, IPC, and latency, or enable the latest CPU instruction sets.
