News Chinese Loongson CPU Takes on 2020-Era Core i3-10100F in Benchmarks

[Admin]

An independent review of the Loongson 3A6000 has cropped up, confirming that the chip features Comet Lake-like performance with an IPC rate akin to AMD's Zen 3 chips.

Chinese Loongson CPU Takes on 2020-Era Core i3-10100F in Benchmarks : Read more

 

[bit_user]

However, the CPU does not feature native x86 support due to political reasons.

No, Loongson has been around for a while and never even tried to do x86, as far as I'm aware. Remember that even before the issue of ISA getting politicized, not just anyone could decide to build a x86 CPU. To do so requires patents that Intel & AMD won't simply let just anyone use.

If anything, Loongson was cloning MIPS, but they insist it's not MIPS and actually have a few good points on that front.

 

[Findecanor]

No, Loongson has been around for a while and never even tried to do x86, as far as I'm aware.

LoongSon's approach is not to support the ISA in hardware, but to translate x86 code in software.
They have developed extensions to their base ISA with instructions that have specific x86 behaviour, that are not supposed to be used by native programs.

 

[Cooe]

The Ryzen 3 3100 was Zen 2 based NOT ZEN 3!!!! You're entire headline is straight up wrong. 🤷

 

[nookoool]

Any chance we will ever see more mainstream benchmarks like geekbench ported over?

 

[bit_user]

LoongSon's approach is not to support the ISA in hardware, but to translate x86 code in software.
They have developed extensions to their base ISA with instructions that have specific x86 behaviour, that are not supposed to be used by native programs.

That's basically what Apple did. They have a special mode you put a core into, which changes the behavior of its caches and memory subsystem to match x86. Furthermore, Apple hid a nonstandard extension in an obscure part of the ARM ISA to make it faster to emulate certain key x86 instructions.

 

[bit_user]

Any chance we will ever see more mainstream benchmarks like geekbench ported over?

I sort of doubt it, but perhaps it'll happen if it catches on as a mainstream client platform. However, since it supports Linux, there's a wealth of other benchmarks it should be able to run.

SPEC2006 is an odd choice, because it's been declared fully obsolete by SPEC. Furthermore, they should be able to run SPEC2017. On most modern CPUs, SPEC2006 seems to have artificially high cache hit-rates. In contrast, the SPEC2017 rate-n benchmarks are incredibly memory-intensive. That could suggest why they opted to run the former and not the latter, but it's also possible the CPU & its toolchain support is so new they hit a few bugs in SPEC2017.