Chinese chipmaker Loongson claims its 16-core 3C6000 CPU matches Intel's Ice Lake 16-core Xeon Silver 4314

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Set to be available in Q4 2024.

Loongson
(Image credit: Loongson)

Following the successful tape-out of its 16-core 3C6000 processor in February, Loongson has been bringing up the CPU and has tested actual samples of the chip. According to data shared by the company at the 2024 Global Digital Economy Conference in Lhasa, the processor is just as fast as Intel's 16-core Xeon Silver 4314 processor, reports ITHome.

The Loongson 3C6000 is a monolithic chip packing 16 cores featuring the LA664 proprietary MIPS-derived microarchitecture supporting simultaneous multithreading technology (SMT) that operates at an undisclosed frequency. It also has four DDR4-3200 memory interfaces and 64 PCIe Gen4 links. The CPU's performance is supposedly comparable to that of Intel's 16-core Xeon Silver 4314 processor, released in Q2 2021 and powered by the Ice Lake microarchitecture. However, Loongson hasn't disclosed the specific benchmarks.

Loongson once said it expected its LoongArch 6000 microarchitecture to match the instructions per clock (IPC) performance of AMD's Zen 3 cores. Hence, the current performance indicators are more or less in line with that expectation, a notable achievement for the Chinese CPU designer.

There is a catch, though. According to the report, Loongson's 3C6000 will be available in the fourth quarter of 2024, and production will ramp up in 2025, so the processor will still be about four years and three generations behind Intel's Xeon 6 for servers.

There are some other things to note as well. One of the notable innovations in the Loongson 3C6000 is the introduction of the Loongson Coherent Link (LoongLink) technology. This interconnection enables chiplet-to-chiplet communication, akin to AMD's Infinity Fabric and Nvidia's NVLink. This technology makes Loongson's 3C6000 essentially a building block for constructing CPUs with higher core counts.

In particular, Loongson is working on its dual-chiplet 3D6000 with 32 cores and 64 threads and quad-chiplet 3E6000 with 64 cores and 128 threads. We don't know when these processors will come to market, though we expect they'll only arrive after the initial single chiplet version, mostly likely some time in 2025.

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Geef
    I wish to officially claim my Hamster 001 is able to spin his wheel fast enough to offer performance comparable to that of Intel's Xeon Silver 4314 'Ice Lake' processor.

    The word 'CLAIM' doesn't mean much. Especially when... I won't say it.
    Reply
  • Neilbob
    'We don't know when these processors will come to market, though they shouldn't arrive earlier than in the second half of 2024.'
    Going to be pernickety again, reluctantly (not at all reluctantly).

    We are already in the second half of 2024.
    Aren't we? I've not lost almost a whole month in the twisted depths of my mind, have I?

    Not much to say about the actual claim. It is what it is.
    Reply
  • nookoool
    Geef said:
    I wish to officially claim my Hamster 001 is able to spin his wheel fast enough to offer performance comparable to that of Intel's Xeon Silver 4314 'Ice Lake' processor.

    The word 'CLAIM' doesn't mean much. Especially when... I won't say it.

    Buy one and run a benchmark?
    Reply
  • artk2219
    Admin said:
    Loongson's 16-core 3C6000 datacenter CPU offers performance comparable to that of Intel's Xeon Silver 4314 'Ice Lake' processor, so it will still be around four years behind market leaders.

    Chinese chipmaker Loongson claims its 16-core 3C6000 CPU matches Intel's 16-core Xeon Silver 4314 : Read more
    The whole thing with being equivalent to a CPU that 4 years old, is that its old enough that you could pickup a server thats running with it for a pretty good price, used. Which means that fact would need to be at least be somewhat reflected in your new pricing. While this is great for China and their quest for self sufficiency, it makes for a hard sell to anyone else in the world. Honestly it even makes it a hard sale for anyone in China that can get their hands on used servers, which are being sent there by the tons daily anyway. Regardless, it's a good achievement, just not necessarily good enough to get amazing sales figures on.
    Reply
  • tamalero
    artk2219 said:
    The whole thing with being equivalent to a CPU that 4 years old, is that its old enough that you could pickup a server thats running with it for a pretty good price, used. Which means that fact would need to be at least be somewhat reflected in your new pricing. While this is great for China and their quest for self sufficiency, it makes for a hard sell to anyone else in the world. Honestly it even makes it a hard sale for anyone in China that can get their hands on used servers, which are being sent there by the tons daily anyway. Regardless, it's a good achievement, just not necessarily good enough to get amazing sales figures on.
    I think the main point is how they have been improving power and efficiency at an insane rate.
    Remember it was.. what? one year and half and the chip had a Kaby Lake performance levels per core?
    Reply
  • derekullo
    It's not the size of your cache, but how you use it!
    Reply
  • Nyara
    artk2219 said:
    The whole thing with being equivalent to a CPU that 4 years old, is that its old enough that you could pickup a server thats running with it for a pretty good price, used. Which means that fact would need to be at least be somewhat reflected in your new pricing. While this is great for China and their quest for self sufficiency, it makes for a hard sell to anyone else in the world. Honestly it even makes it a hard sale for anyone in China that can get their hands on used servers, which are being sent there by the tons daily anyway. Regardless, it's a good achievement, just not necessarily good enough to get amazing sales figures on.
    The worry is not much the used CPU's price, Loongson can easily sell for cheaper since they use SMIC cache & wafers, without taxes, and no shipment costs, and still just using spammeable DUV.

    The concern is more that Intel will sell for pennies their 10nm+++++ in the coming years, this is common knowledge, as Intel is forced to profit up to invest back into their EUV nodes, currently on minimal production.

    Loongson is mostly a research team, that the Chinese goverment can easily scale up into mass production if they see fit, but it is just not worth to do that if they cannot be competitive with Raptor's Lake or Bartlett's Lake, or their server equivalents, yet. But this is the closest they got ever to that goal, so it is another important milestone for them.
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    With so low price on used broadwell xeons they need to build a new chipset around of these xeons ... think you can put 4 sockets or even more on a single board. Scrap wars
    Reply
  • nookoool
    artk2219 said:
    The whole thing with being equivalent to a CPU that 4 years old, is that its old enough that you could pickup a server thats running with it for a pretty good price, used. Which means that fact would need to be at least be somewhat reflected in your new pricing. While this is great for China and their quest for self sufficiency, it makes for a hard sell to anyone else in the world. Honestly it even makes it a hard sale for anyone in China that can get their hands on used servers, which are being sent there by the tons daily anyway. Regardless, it's a good achievement, just not necessarily good enough to get amazing sales figures on.

    I don't think the Chinese CPU will be free market efficient until a future date either. However, the government has mandate all government , military, edu, critical infrastructure related industries and state own enterprises need to move to Chinese tech. Private companies like tencent, alibaba, etc are also hedging part of their IT using Chinese tech as well since they NOW understand that the US can/will undermine them at some point via tech sanctions.

    The main thing affecting Loongson sales is it's odd ball architecture as other Chinese vendors are x86/Arm. At the moment, they either need to have tools/runtime/software well ported or be able to run x86/arm translation efficiently.
    Reply