Chinese chipmaker Loongson recently announced in an investor call its 3B6600 CPU, which will likely succeed the 3A6000 processor that debuted in April 2024. According to Fast Technology (machine translated), the new desktop chip features eight cores and will have an integrated GPU. But, more importantly, the company claims that the Loongson 3B6600 is competitive with Intel Core i5 and i7 chips of the Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processor families. While these processors are already four years old, having been launched in November 2021, they still mark an advancement over the 3A6000 which is compared to 14nm chips, which were in production from 2014 to early 2021.
The 386600 CPU is expected to maintain the 2.5GHz frequency of the previous generation 3A6000 chip. However, its single-core turbo frequency is expected to increase by 20%, allowing it to hit as much as 3GHz. Loongson even claims that its single-core performance would be one of the world leaders, but we’d like to see proper benchmarking to back this up. Aside from its single- and multi-core performance, the new chip will also support DDR5 memory, PCIe 4.0, and HDMI 2.1 output.
The company has been working on these chips since April 2024, and we expect them to arrive on the market later this year. Despite that, they’re still years behind the cutting-edge chips produced by TSMC, AMD, and Intel. Because of this, even local companies are seemingly reluctant to adopt these homegrown processors, so Loongson is likely facing an uphill battle even as China blocks Western-made chips from government offices and servers.
Despite that, Loongson's silicon has come quite a long way, especially as the company seems to be starting from scratch and doesn’t have the decades of expertise that American and Taiwanese firms have. American sanctions are likely pushing Chinese companies to develop alternatives to chips that have had export controls applied to them, and we’ve seen innovations like “tock-tock-tick” strategy to help close the gap.
