Chinese Loongson has developed 3C6000 server processors that can compete with Intel Xeon Ice Lake

The Chinese company Loongson, known for its processors for the consumer and server markets, announced the completion of the design phase of its new server processor Loongson 3C6000. The company claims that the new product will be able to surpass Intel Ice Lake 10nm processors, providing up to 64 cores.

At a recent conference held in China, Loongson revealed some details about the 3C6000. The new CPU is based on LA664 cores with proprietary LoongArch architecture. The new cores provide double the overall performance compared to the cores of the previous generation 3C5000 chip. The new 3C6000 processor is built on a single chiplet with 16 cores and 32 threads, it supports four DDR4-3200 memory channels and has 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

There will also be LS3D6000 chips with a pair of such chiplets (32 cores and 64 threads), as well as LS3D6000 with four chiplets, 60 or 64 cores and 120 or 128 threads, respectively. An important feature of these new products will be the upgraded Dragonchain interconnect, which made it possible to create more complex configurations with a large number of cores.

According to preliminary data, the performance of the Loongson 3C6000 processor is superior to the Intel Xeon Silver 4314 – this is the 16-core Xeon Salable chip of the previous generation, Ice Lake-SP. In turn, the LS3D6000 should outperform the Intel Xeon Gold 6338 (32-core Ice Lake-SP). Thus, Loongson will be only 1-2 generations behind Intel, which can be considered a very worthy result.

Loongson also provided the results of testing the new chips in comparison with their predecessors. In the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark, the 3C6000 was 60-95% faster than the 3C5000, and in UnixBench tests there was a performance increase of 33% in single-threaded tasks and twice as much in multi-threaded tasks. However, it should be noted that these results are based on early samples, and final performance may be even higher.

According to the company, the processor has already passed the digital design stage and will soon be put into production. The Loongson 3C6000 is expected to go on sale in the fourth quarter of 2024, while more powerful chips such as the dual-chip LS3D6000 and quad-chip LS3E6000 will follow in 2025, according to the company’s roadmap.