China's Premiere Chipmaker Accelerates to 7nm CPU Design Despite US Sanctions

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Better late than never.

A Loongson Chinese CPU.
(Image credit: Loongson)

Chinese CPU and GPU maker Loongson is beginning its transition to 7nm in 2024, which will apparently provide a 20% to 30% uplift in performance (via Digitimes). Due to U.S. sanctions, the company's upcoming 7nm chips can only be fabbed in China — and although that might cost Loongson some performance and efficiency, it's still a win for China's native semiconductor industry.

Loongson is one of China's premier chip makers, offering both CPUs and GPUs. It currently makes 12nm CPUs (likely fabbed by Chinese foundry SMIC), and the upgrade to 7nm should boost the performance of the 3A7000 CPU by 20% to 30%. Development for 7nm chips will begin next year, and, since it takes a while to fully finish a chip, the final products probably won't arrive until 2025 at the earliest.

The company's latest 12nm-fabbed 3A6000 CPU seemingly has the IPC of Zen 3 CPUs, which is very impressive considering Zen 3 was a node ahead and made by a more veteran company. However, the 3A6000 is only a quad-core CPU, and since the 3A5000 was also a quad-core, it's looking likely that the 3A7000 will also have just four cores, which means limited multicore performance gains.

The company does offer larger CPUs for servers, and this is where 7nm might play a critical role. Like AMD, Loongson uses chiplets for its server CPUs, with each chiplet containing 16 cores. This newer 7nm process presumably provides greater density in addition to higher performance and efficiency, and more density means smaller chips or room for more cores. Loongson's 7nm server CPUs could either come with a ton more performance or become significantly cheaper to produce.

One thing that isn't so clear is where Loongson is fabbing its 7nm processors. It can't be a fab like Intel, TSMC, or Samsung due to U.S. sanctions, so that leaves just one realistic option:  Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. SMIC is China's biggest foundry, and it's rumored that Huawei is fabbing a 7nm (or even 5nm) smartphone chip at SMIC.

Fabbing its chips at SMIC might not be ideal for Loongson since 7nm chips in 2025 or beyond are far from cutting-edge, but it is yet another step towards silicon autonomy for China. 

Matthew Connatser
Matthew Connatser

Matthew Connatser is a freelancing writer for Tom's Hardware US. He writes articles about CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and computers in general.

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6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • anonymousdude
    I see we're still parroting incorrect information about the 3A6000 having IPC competitive with Zen 3. The previous article you linked to incorrectly calls a Ryzen 3 3100 as a Zen 3 part when it's actually Zen 2. Even the Mydrivers review you pulled from says it's competitive with Zen 2.

    Basically this new CPU will likely end up somewhere between Zen 3/10th gen and Zen 4/13th gen if we take 20% - 30% improvement at face value. Probably closer to the former.
    Reply
  • HaninTH
    anonymousdude said:
    I see we're still parroting incorrect information about the 3A6000 having IPC competitive with Zen 3. The previous article you linked to incorrectly calls a Ryzen 3 3100 as a Zen 3 part when it's actually Zen 2. Even the Mydrivers review you pulled from says it's competitive with Zen 2.

    Basically this new CPU will likely end up somewhere between Zen 3/10th gen and Zen 4/13th gen if we take 20% - 30% improvement at face value. Probably closer to the former.
    Does this mean their per-core performance is on par with Zen2? At what task(s)? How does the CPU hold up under a typical and high-end desktop load? What peripheral interfaces does it support?

    The talk of these chips rarely give good details and their comparisons always seem heavily slanted.

    Competition, from where ever it comes, is always greatly appreciated by the end-user/customer. I just hope these chips aren't riddled with more backdoors and flaws than the Intel and AMD flavors.
    Reply
  • EdgeLovagrend
    So a few things that I've heard from some other analysts. These new 7nm Chinese chips cost China 5x more to develop and the manufacturing process is inefficient. The Huawei phones with their 7nm are constantly suffering from supply issues and are not very common. What does this tell you? Demand can't meet supply? Or that the means of mass production is very limited.. you can make a lot of high tech stuff in a lab but mass production is a challenging next step. As one analyst put it this is mostly ego so China can claim it beat sanctions and is advancing ever closer to US technology. I guess time will tell.
    Reply
  • anonymousdude
    HaninTH said:
    Does this mean their per-core performance is on par with Zen2? At what task(s)? How does the CPU hold up under a typical and high-end desktop load? What peripheral interfaces does it support?

    The talk of these chips rarely give good details and their comparisons always seem heavily slanted.

    Competition, from where ever it comes, is always greatly appreciated by the end-user/customer. I just hope these chips aren't riddled with more backdoors and flaws than the Intel and AMD flavors.

    They ran SPEC CPU 2006 and Unixbench. The 3A6000 was performing slightly worse than the Ryzen 3 3100 and the 10100F. I haven't seen any power/efficiency numbers.

    Also I reread the article from Tom's and Mydrivers. The claim for IPC competitive with Zen 3 isn't wrong, but speculative at best. The 3A6000 is only clocked at 2.5 GHZ so I see where the claim was extrapolated from now. Increases in clock speed don't linearly scale with performance. In certain tasks it will, others not. Just depends on how CPU dependent the task is.
    Reply
  • anonymousdude
    EdgeLovagrend said:
    So a few things that I've heard from some other analysts. These new 7nm Chinese chips cost China 5x more to develop and the manufacturing process is inefficient. The Huawei phones with their 7nm are constantly suffering from supply issues and are not very common. What does this tell you? Demand can't meet supply? Or that the means of mass production is very limited.. you can make a lot of high tech stuff in a lab but mass production is a challenging next step. As one analyst put it this is mostly ego so China can claim it beat sanctions and is advancing ever closer to US technology. I guess time will tell.

    I haven't seen the 5x cost numbers before. Care to drop a link to these analysts? It definitely cost more to make since they have to implement multipatterning. Yields are likely still poor, which is expected. Basically all the same problems TSMC, Intel, and Samsung had to work through.
    Reply
  • nookoool
    EdgeLovagrend said:
    So a few things that I've heard from some other analysts. These new 7nm Chinese chips cost China 5x more to develop and the manufacturing process is inefficient. The Huawei phones with their 7nm are constantly suffering from supply issues and are not very common. What does this tell you? Demand can't meet supply? Or that the means of mass production is very limited.. you can make a lot of high tech stuff in a lab but mass production is a challenging next step. As one analyst put it this is mostly ego so China can claim it beat sanctions and is advancing ever closer to US technology. I guess time will tell.

    I am no expert, but I can only guess that early 7nm tsmc chips cost a multiple more to produce and suffer low yield compare to 1,2,3,4 years latter.
    Reply