Loongson may not be a familiar name to many, but it is poised to gain prominence in the client desktop segment. The Chinese semiconductor company has consistently improved the performance of its 3A series of CPUs to the extent that they could pose a significant challenge to AMD and Intel.
The Loongson 3A6000 was recently evaluated by mydrivers, where the CPU demonstrated impressive performance against an AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and Intel’s Core i3-10100F. While both Intel and AMD have made substantial gains in IPC since the release of these CPU generations, Loongson has come remarkably close to their performance levels.
The Loongson 3A6000, much like its predecessor, is a 2.5GHz 4-core, 8-thread CPU. However, this time, it delivers twice the performance in Spec CPU 2006 benchmarks. In these benchmarks, it matches the Core i3-10100F in one test but falls 10 to 14% short of the Ryzen 3 3100’s results.
What’s even more impressive about these results is that the Loongson 3A6000 achieves this level of performance despite operating at a clock speed 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz lower than the Ryzen 3 3100 and Core i3-10100F, respectively. This indicates that at the same clock frequency, the Loongson CPU boasts better IPC than the Zen 2 and Comet-Lake-based CPUs. Although information regarding TDP is currently unavailable, if it proves to be competitive, the Loongson 3A6000 could pose an even greater challenge to established industry players.
Currently, the 3A6000 is only available in the Chinese domestic market. However, it’s only a matter of time before these CPUs and their supporting platforms expand to a global audience. With NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and other companies poised to make inroads into the desktop CPU market, we can expect to see an influx of new players in the PC space in the near future.
