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

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.