News Chinese chipmaker's new 7nm CPUs reportedly outperform Intel's Raptor Lake — Loongson adopts "tock-tock-tick" strategy to close the gap with Intel

[DaveLTX]

Raw performance isn't even there, and then compiler executes 3 times more instructions than it needs to.

 

[tamalero]

LMAO, I'll believe when I see it reviewed and torn down by a non-Chinese reviewer. This is coming from a person who generally thinks Chinese CPU companies can eventually reach near parity with Intel/AMD. This is probably some hype piece that leaves out it taking obscene amount of power, tons of cores, or some use of western IP in order to reach those gigantic claims. The amount of progress made in such a short time makes me really doubt the authenticity, especially when Chinese GPU companies are still about a decade behind (although the situation between CPU and GPU development might not match up very well).

Kinda like Intel's gpus. Took them a good chunk to get traction. ( I mean discrete gpus lol )

 

[Lemming Overlord]

Seriously, who okayed this garbage fluff piece?

Suggesting that a pseudo 3GHz CPU is already beating Raptor Lake and then writing about it taping out sometime next year is hilarious and tells me everything I need to know about how bad Tom's Hardware has become.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

LMAO, I'll believe when I see it reviewed and torn down by a non-Chinese reviewer. This is coming from a person who generally thinks Chinese CPU companies can eventually reach near parity with Intel/AMD. This is probably some hype piece that leaves out it taking obscene amount of power, tons of cores, or some use of western IP in order to reach those gigantic claims. The amount of progress made in such a short time makes me really doubt the authenticity, especially when Chinese GPU companies are still about a decade behind (although the situation between CPU and GPU development might not match up very well).

They are comparing next gen loongson IPC to 12th and 13th gen Intel IPC, which are very close to eachother. However this is misleading because it is much easier to create a core design that has high IPC but limited high frequency stability (loongson’s current cores are limited to 3 GHz due to their core designs stability wall), whereas it is magnitudes harder to design a core with equivalent IPC that is stable to 6 GHz+ like Intel and AMD.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

Well you can ask NASA for one, if they think China's progress in their space program is just BS on their propaganda machine. Mind you China does not have any problem with leaks in their spacecraft or their astronauts being stranded in space. Nothing of that sort. Unlike the other space superpower.

What are you talking about? Long march rockets leak like a sieve. Every single long march launch I’ve seen shows the rockets billowing orange clouds of toxic unsymmetrical di-methyl-hydrazine fuel. The west has been restricting the use of hydrazine within atmosphere for the past 60 years now due to its effects on life and the environment, yet a certain country has no problem launching these toxic sieves from sites well inside their interior surrounded by towns and villages, where seemingly the levels of cancer are factors higher than normal.

I think we will take an advanced manned spacecraft with initial teething troubles and an extended stay in space any day of the week.
https://www.twz.com/why-chinese-rockets-spew-toxic-bright-red-gas-clouds-on-launch

Video shows China's falling rocket debris exploding in village

The debris from China's latest satellite launch fell in southern parts of the country.

www.newsweek.com

https://gizmodo.com/china-rocket-booster-crash-leaking-toxic-fuel-1851557049

 

[mitch074]

What are you talking about? Long march rockets leak like a sieve. Every single long march launch I’ve seen shows the rockets billowing orange clouds of toxic unsymmetrical di-methyl-hydrazine fuel. The west has been restricting the use of hydrazine within atmosphere for the past 60 years now due to its effects on life and the environment, yet a certain country has no problem launching these toxic sieves from sites well inside their interior surrounded by towns and villages, where seemingly the levels of cancer are factors higher than normal.

I think we will take an advanced manned spacecraft with initial teething troubles and an extended stay in space any day of the week.

Maybe, probably even.
Still, no one believed China could put a manned space station in orbit, yet they did.
5 years ago, Chinese CPUs could only approach 20% of the performance of US chips, now they are in the same IPC ballpark.
I'm not saying you should start playing games on a Chinese chip, but I wouldn't dismiss that achievement either.
Remember Intel and early Ryzen, in 2017? Who's the performance leader now?

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

Maybe, probably even.
Still, no one believed China could put a manned space station in orbit, yet they did.
5 years ago, Chinese CPUs could only approach 20% of the performance of US chips, now they are in the same IPC ballpark.
I'm not saying you should start playing games on a Chinese chip, but I wouldn't dismiss that achievement either.
Remember Intel and early Ryzen, in 2017? Who's the performance leader now?

Of course, but I would say Intel’s fall from leadership was 99% due to corporate mishandling and not AMD being better at innovation.
Plus Loongson is benefitting from being on the vertical portion of the technology S-curve (IE it is much easier to rapidly catch up when pioneers before you documented the way forward, it is much harder to pave the way)


<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/figure/S-Curve-of-Technology-Performance_fig2_365361544"><img src="https://www.researchgate.net/profil...5315392/S-Curve-of-Technology-Performance.png" alt="S-Curve of Technology Performance"/></a>

 

[das_stig]

TH once so pro-Intel, now just a pawn for Chinese BS.

 

[mitch074]

Of course, but I would say Intel’s fall from leadership was 99% due to corporate mishandling and not AMD being better at innovation.
Plus Loongson is benefitting from being on the vertical portion of the technology S-curve (IE it is much easier to rapidly catch up when pioneers before you documented the way forward, it is much harder to pave the way)

That's what I'm pointing at - complacency. And it starts with, "that will never work" or "they will never be able to do it". Intel got bit in the butt, hard, on it. The Chinese have demonstrated, time and time again, that they can do things, and achieve them -especially when it comes to playing the long game.
And it's cultural, with them - look at the story of the foolish old man and the mountain (story here).

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

That's what I'm pointing at - complacency. And it starts with, "that will never work" or "they will never be able to do it". Intel got bit in the butt, hard, on it. The Chinese have demonstrated, time and time again, that they can do things, and achieve them -especially when it comes to playing the long game.
And it's cultural, with them - look at the story of the foolish old man and the mountain (story here).

No, it’s not complacency, it is the fact that it is much easier to find something when you have a map to guide you (aka loongson) vs being the ones who discover the something and then draw the map (aka AMD and Intel).

And no, Chinese culture has nothing to do with it, Taiwanese culture is considered (whether warranted or not) to produce one of the hardest working populations in the world, yet somehow the Arizona TSMC plant is 4% more efficient than TSMC’s 4nm fab in Taiwan while using American labor…

Intel’s woes are due to bad leadership which can happen to any company in any country regardless of culture.

 

[LordVile]

Yeah I agree I don't buy into this hype. Are we going to find out they are comparing an Intel quad core to their eight core part which has been common in these hype pieces from Chinese companies? I honestly don't know but I would hardly be surprised if this ends up being the case. But as stated by others the so called gains they've been claiming have been mostly vaporware and the result of headhunting those with the expertise/IP access of western countries. Time will tell where this actually leads, or doesn't.

To be fair to them Qualcomm do the same when they compare to Apples chips

 

[KyaraM]

Considering how Intel and AMD are extremely close performance-wise, why the hell is this only an "Intel issue", instead of an Intel/AMD one? Sorry to break the news, but despite everything going on lately, Intel is still selling more chips in regular systems, actually picked up market share again this year, and quite a lot use them in gaming, too. Including DIY. With all Intels current issues, I doubt it would be as big an impact as some people here gleefully make it out to be. Especially since nobody in the west will know these new chips. Sure, China is the biggest market and all that. But they already started to make that switch with government and iirc some company systems, especially since most office systems don't need all that oomph. You can use Word and Excel (and their Chinese equivalents) on 10 years old systems with little trouble.

That said, yeah, I highly doubt these claims based on everything that is known. What are they comparing their new "Raptor Lake equivalent chip" against anyways? The 13100? The 14900k? Something in between? Which is it? How many cores does the new chip have, especially compared to the one they compare it to? A 3-4 generations jump sounds quite unrealistic, honestly, even if they lean heavily on the developments Intel/AMD made over the past decades. In two or three generations? Maybe. I can see that, honestly. Right now? I have some doubts. Especially if those chips really onlu run at 3 GHz.

 

[Findecanor]

Good for Loongson, but so far I've only heard about their CPUs being used in computers for the Chinese state and military.

Similarly, IBM's latest Tedium CPU (or whatever it is called) is only used in mainframes.

If they don't get widespread distribution, then they are not that interesting other than perhaps from a deeply nerdy technical perspective.

 

[adamXpeter]

Nice to see that all the experts realizet they are talking about clock for clock (IPC) performance...

 

[Pierce2623]

They are on tsmc 7nm I guarantee.

They can’t get any useful quantity built at TSMC. After the last Huawei incident, I guarantee that if ANYONE other than a well known major player shows up with a fully modern high level CPU design, TSMC will smell a rat and just say “no capacity left, sorry”.

Yeah I agree I don't buy into this hype. Are we going to find out they are comparing an Intel quad core to their eight core part which has been common in these hype pieces from Chinese companies? I honestly don't know but I would hardly be surprised if this ends up being the case. But as stated by others the so called gains they've been claiming have been mostly vaporware and the result of headhunting those with the expertise/IP access of western countries. Time will tell where this actually leads, or doesn't.

Last year, on the version before this one, they were “equal to Zen1” and that actually turned out to mean that on a few random occasions they could almost match zen1 in IPC, but they couldn’t get above 2.5GHz. So the performance was MUCH less regardless. I mentioned in another comment that the last design is actually weaker than an Alder Lake E core(not a p core, an e core) but they expect us to believe that the next 8 core will match, 8 Raptor Lake p cores and a bundle of e cores….Thats just funny.

Back in early 2021, China announced that their space station was nearing completion and launching. Like you I took this with a large pinch of salt. The then NASA administrator Charles Boldin has this to say : "Technologically I don't think they're going to catch up as long as we keep up with the pace that we are going in terms of human space flight."
Fast forward today, their Tiangong space station has been in use and expanded for the past 3 years. Their Chang'e lunar module 6 has gone to the far side of the moon and back with samples. While NASA astronauts are still stranded in space. It would not be wise to knick down and write off their efforts too soon. Elon Musk made the same mistake back on 2011 when he laughed at Chinese ev maker BYD for making crappy cars. Today they have surpassed Tesla as the largest ev company in the world. They even added a pinch of your salt to his wound when he added BYD as one of his battery suppliers. He knows for a fact their blade battery which is used in model Y, is one of the safest battery tech around.
So don't be Elon Musk 2 in a hurry.

How well does a BYD compare to a Tesla in an actual qualitative analysis, though? Just because a Chinese company sells more cars in China than Tesla doesn’t mean they’re better. Loongson has actually sold hundreds of thousands of their garbage chips in China too. It doesn’t make them better than an AMD. Also the US got to space on 1950s technology and designed the current ISS with 1980s technology. I think you’re overestimating the technology required to get to space. It requires monetary resources much more so than the newest tech.

 

[gggplaya]

"The 3B6600, for example, is claimed to perform at par with Intel 12th—and 13th-generation CPUs thanks to its new eight LA864 cores with a clock frequency of just 3 GHz. It will be tapped out in 2025."

So a chip that is not even far enough in development to have a prototype or engineering sample, with only 8 cores, running at only 3GHz will somehow match the multicore monsters running at 5GHz+ that intel/AMD produce.

Stop the presses folks, this is real news!

I think what's most important to gleen is whether or not the Chinese chip makers have caught up to Intel and AMD's IPC performance. So if the Intel/AMD counterparts are also run at 3ghz, do they have the same performance? Once they reach IPC parity, they can refine their design to optimize for clock speed.

The question is, without independent verification, is this just CCP propoganda, or can they really catch up?

 

[magnusb]

Why write an article and state something as a fact based on NOTHING at all.
Is TH now the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist party?
Who is this klutz Klotz?

 

[nookoool]

Maybe, probably even.
Still, no one believed China could put a manned space station in orbit, yet they did.
5 years ago, Chinese CPUs could only approach 20% of the performance of US chips, now they are in the same IPC ballpark.
I'm not saying you should start playing games on a Chinese chip, but I wouldn't dismiss that achievement either.
Remember Intel and early Ryzen, in 2017? Who's the performance leader now?

Kinda odd for a tech site comments not to be cheering on and being excited for a new processor architecture/vendor ....

Anyways, I've been following video snippets of the Loongson from 3A4000 to 3A6000 and the user experience seem to have improve vastly in 3 years. The 3A4000 was barely capable of playing 1080p streaming videos while multitasking and now there are videos of the 3a6000 being able to play < 2010 era pc/ps(2 or 3?) , gensin impact games via a double layer of x86/arm-loongarch binary conversion and emulation.


What I would like to see is a modern benchmark like geekbench / passmark / cinebench being ported over so we can see a modern performance comparison.

 

[nookoool]

LMAO, I'll believe when I see it reviewed and torn down by a non-Chinese reviewer. This is coming from a person who generally thinks Chinese CPU companies can eventually reach near parity with Intel/AMD. This is probably some hype piece that leaves out it taking obscene amount of power, tons of cores, or some use of western IP in order to reach those gigantic claims. The amount of progress made in such a short time makes me really doubt the authenticity, especially when Chinese GPU companies are still about a decade behind (although the situation between CPU and GPU development might not match up very well).

I mean , anyone can buy one off aliexpress from an exporter and shipped to your door or off tabobao/jd if you have a local that can reship for you to test. No need to make racist comments

As mention elsewhere, they are going by instructions per a cycle. Its a bit of a marketing trick, but i guess is valid.

For the comment about why they are pushing large core counts.. Well it is easier to push adoption of these processor in the server space than getting consumers to adopt a new platform where you need to jump hoops to get certain software to work.

 

[defunctup]

Thank you Tom's Hardware for accurate and unbiased reporting on China technology and innovation. so many sinophobes, racists, and xenophobic ILLOGICAL arguments and hypocrisy made in the comments while western countries have been stealing IP, technology, and inventions for millenia (through both violent and nonviolent means) and never get called out for it. China will overtake the US in the silicon business. it's not an if but when at this point. 💪

 

[TCA_ChinChin]

I mean , anyone can buy one off aliexpress from an exporter and shipped to your door or off tabobao/jd if you have a local that can reship for you to test. No need to make racist comments

As mention elsewhere, they are going by instructions per a cycle. Its a bit of a marketing trick, but i guess is valid.

For the comment about why they are pushing large core counts.. Well it is easier to push adoption of these processor in the server space than getting consumers to adopt a new platform where you need to jump hoops to get certain software to work.

I would tone down my language but its hard to do so when they and others in the industry put out these outlandish claims. I'm similarly skeptical and upset when current top dogs like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia put out their marketing claims but I spoke out here since Loongson isn't making their case any easier putting out these claims and failing short in public perception when they come out. If AMD or Intel pushed something similar out, it'd be lampooned but meet less scrutiny since they're the established, well known, western x86 CPU makers. Unfortunately, Loongson's got to meet a higher standard for claims since nobody here trusts what they make, regardless of racism or bias. These types of articles makes it hard for people to see the real progress they've made over the years by grossly overhyping a decent improvement.

 

[upsetkiller]

Lmao western arrogance never fails to amaze me

All these claims about theft, spying and what not with not only no proof but the source being American media 😂 huawei showed us how free market usa truely is.

We all know usa and its cronies are desperately trying to keep its lead in scientific fields and its rapidly losing ground, not to mention the biggest American innovations were imported from elsewhere to begin with, so all these comments about *stealing work* is highly hypocritical. You folk will keep ranting here meanwhile china has been able to exponentially improve its designs gen on gen. Compared to early 2000s the gap is much much closer now.

Ipc tests showed their last architecture being faster than zen+ clock for clock. Thats a far cry from being orders of magnitude behind the best western chips just a decade ago.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

Lmao western arrogance never fails to amaze me

All these claims about theft, spying and what not with not only no proof but the source being American media 😂 huawei showed us how free market usa truely is.

We all know usa and its cronies are desperately trying to keep its lead in scientific fields and its rapidly losing ground, not to mention the biggest American innovations were imported from elsewhere to begin with, so all these comments about *stealing work* is highly hypocritical. You folk will keep ranting here meanwhile china has been able to exponentially improve its designs gen on gen. Compared to early 2000s the gap is much much closer now.

Ipc tests showed their last architecture being faster than zen+ clock for clock. Thats a far cry from being orders of magnitude behind the best western chips just a decade ago.

Was there a persistent echo in the room your wrote this comment in?

 

[mitch074]

No, it’s not complacency, it is the fact that it is much easier to find something when you have a map to guide you (aka loongson) vs being the ones who discover the something and then draw the map (aka AMD and Intel).

And no, Chinese culture has nothing to do with it, Taiwanese culture is considered (whether warranted or not) to produce one of the hardest working populations in the world, yet somehow the Arizona TSMC plant is 4% more efficient than TSMC’s 4nm fab in Taiwan while using American labor…

Intel’s woes are due to bad leadership which can happen to any company in any country regardless of culture.

I didn't write "Taiwan", I said "China". As for the TSMC factories, you're confusing "yield" and "efficiency" - which, on a factory that has yet to reach full operational capacity, means... Not much, really, because while yield do impact efficiency, if you need twice the number of workers and 4 times the man-hours to reach that rate, efficiency as a whole isn't exactly much better.

 

[mitch074]

Kinda odd for a tech site comments not to be cheering on and being excited for a new processor architecture/vendor ....

Anyways, I've been following video snippets of the Loongson from 3A4000 to 3A6000 and the user experience seem to have improve vastly in 3 years. The 3A4000 was barely capable of playing 1080p streaming videos while multitasking and now there are videos of the 3a6000 being able to play < 2010 era pc/ps(2 or 3?) , gensin impact games via a double layer of x86/arm-loongarch binary conversion and emulation.


What I would like to see is a modern benchmark like geekbench / passmark / cinebench being ported over so we can see a modern performance comparison.

You're more likely to find those on Linux websites like Phoronix, if Michael Larabel can get such a system.