Loongson Technology, the company leading China's charge to develop CPUs locally, has revealed its most recent desktop effort performs at a level comparable with Intel's tenth-generation Core architecture.

Chipzilla watchers may recall those chips bore the codenames Comet Lake and Ice Lake, were announced in 2019, and dribbled into the market across 2020 and 2021. Core counts reached ten, turbo-boosted clock speeds topped 5.0GHz, and demand was high as a viral pandemic which was in all the papers at the time sparked a boom in working from home and therefore also in PC purchases.

Intel has since released three further generations of silicon and stands on the threshold of delivering Meteor Lake, its 14th-gen architecture that will fully embrace chiplets and add a VPU (vision processing unit) to accelerate AI workloads.

In a post on Chinese social network QQ.com last week, Loongson shared the results of tests conducted by the China Electronics Standardization Institute on its 2.5GHz quad-core Loongson 3A6000 CPU.

Those tests were run using the SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark - a test that stresses a system's processor, memory subsystem and compiler. It was retired in 2018 - two years before the debut of the Intel silicon with which Loongson claims parity, and five years before these tests.

Loongson's post stated that its silicon scored 43.1/54.6 points respectively on the SPEC CPU 2006 base single-thread fixed/floating point tests, 155/140 points respectively on multi-threaded fixed/floating point tests, and delivered 42GB/sec bandwidth over dual DDR4-3200 memory channels. Unixbench scores topped 7400 points.

Which is not unimpressive, given that Loongson's LoongArch architecture is much younger than Intel's efforts, and the fact that the 3A6000 is the first generation of the nascent chipmaker's current-generation processors. It's typical for early silicon in a processor family to be slower - and feature fewer cores - than later releases.

So perhaps China and Loongson will soon have a client processor that's comparable with the Corei9 screamers that topped the Meteor Lake cycle.

But even if Loongson gets its act together, it still faces a formidable obstacle: its LoongArch architecture and instruction set are proprietary. Regardless of how sophisticated its silicon becomes, Loongson therefore has an enormous job ahead to build a software ecosystem. Linux is yet to support LoongArch fully.

China's government has more than once singalled a shift to computers and operating systems that employ only homemade tech. That decision could catalyze an ecosystem at speed.

But these benchmark results show China has plenty of work left to create an indigenous PC ecosystem. Even if it does, that ecosystem would leave local knowledge workers with much less powerful machines than those available elsewhere, and therefore still dependent on imported tech that the USA is happy to deny the Middle Kingdom in the name of national security. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2023/08/08/loongson_benchmark/