News New homegrown China server chips unveiled with impressive specs — Loongson's 3C6000 CPU comes armed with 64 cores, 128 threads, and performance to...

[Admin]

Loongson has finally released its 64-core 3C6000 data center CPU, featuring CPU performance equivalent to 2023 Intel and AMD data center processors such as the Xeon 8380.

New homegrown China server chips unveiled with impressive specs — Loongson's 3C6000 CPU comes armed with 64 cores, 128 threads, and performance to... : Read more

 

[thestryker]

Intel's 80-core Xeon 8380 based on Intel's 2019-era Ice Lake architecture.

40c/80t

 

[artk2219]

Ill believe it when i see it. Its still a very useful chip, even if it doesn't end up being as fast as the fastest CPU's currently available. I still see more then a few Sandy Bridge - Haswell based servers doing their part to serve many businesses.

 

[gg83]

Ill believe it when i see it. Its still a very useful chip, even if it doesn't end up being as fast as the fastest CPU's currently available. I still see more then a few Sandy Bridge - Haswell based servers doing their part to serve many businesses.

Im pretty sure it's a paid advertisement to get more foreign investment. Toms is always posting these obvious bs claims by Chinese tech firms.

 

[Zizi Mai]

A step in right direction in catching up to Intel & AMD. Anyway it doesn't concern western markets as this chip is for China's internal use. However with the door on western chips closing even more, this chip could save the country when the door is fully shut. If you're Intel or AMD, it's forever bye bye to China's market.

 

[psyconz]

I notice zero mention, or even what should be obvious speculation on Tom's part, about what I assume would be awful power draw.

 

[mj-88]

So much western copium, this is a huge breakthrough for a country that is playing catch up, people seem to gloss over the fact that AMD and Intel were in the same boat just a few years back.
China is a massive market that these sanctions are killing Intel & AMD shares there, and it forces China to divert resources to cover that gap which in turn promotes innovation.
China is already catching up in a lot of fields, last i heard they just dipped into 2nm and the results were heading in the right direction.

 

[phead128]

Im pretty sure it's a paid advertisement to get more foreign investment. Toms is always posting these obvious bs claims by Chinese tech firms.

Foreign investment for what? China's semiconductor industry is all sanctioned up, yet it's continuously making huge breakthroughs despite export controls, which ironically expedites their development.

 

[Amdlova]

I notice zero mention, or even what should be obvious speculation on Tom's part, about what I assume would be awful power draw.

They will power it with coal power plant. Efficiency and green concerns it's not an issue.

 

[Findecanor]

A couple of years ago, a well-renowned CPU-focused web site did quite detailed performance tests of the chips that LoongSon had then, and while the performance was not stellar, it was quite promising.
I therefore see no reason to not believe that they could have evolved to the state that has been claimed now.

I welcome more competition in the server/desktop marketplace. x86 has been dominating for far too long. I wish computing would have had evolved to be less dependent on specific instruction set architectures by now.

I think it is just sad that politics has its dark cloud hovering over everything, and that we therefore probably won't see these anywhere outside China.

 

[wussupi83]

So much western copium, this is a huge breakthrough for a country that is playing catch up, people seem to gloss over the fact that AMD and Intel were in the same boat just a few years back.
China is a massive market that these sanctions are killing Intel & AMD shares there, and it forces China to divert resources to cover that gap which in turn promotes innovation.
China is already catching up in a lot of fields, last i heard they just dipped into 2nm and the results were heading in the right direction.

Playing catch-up to existing tech is not the same as innovating new tech. When the latter happens, then you will see China get more praise for their technology.

 

[das_stig]

Impressive but will reserve judgement until I see one on Aliexpress or Alibaba with a motherboard ...

But lets not forget, China is making big jumps in catching up, if the chips, motherboards and drivers play by the rules and don't phone home or anything other nasties, not long before we have viable alternative and for the buyer, prices crashing?

 

[phead128]

They will power it with coal power plant. Efficiency and green concerns it's not an issue.

This is outdated mindset. China added more solar power in a single month than the entire US solar capacity added in 2024. (source)

 

[Amdlova]

This is outdated mindset. China added more solar power in a single month than the entire US solar capacity added in 2024. (source)

I see your point... They use Coal power at night only.

 

[bit_user]

The 64-core 3E6000 sports 64 cores, 128 threads, 32MB of cache, four 72-bit memory channels — featuring quad channel DDR4-3200 support, and a max frequency of 2.2GHz.

If these specs are accurate:

1. Quad-channel seems awfully suspicious for a 64-core server CPU. Intel went beyond this to six-channel in 2017, when they launched the 28-core Skylake-EP.
2. This seems a particularly poor time to be launching a DDR4-based CPU, given even China's own fabs are switching from DDR4 to DDR5.

 

[bit_user]

Im pretty sure it's a paid advertisement to get more foreign investment. Toms is always posting these obvious bs claims by Chinese tech firms.

Loongson is real and not too shabby. This compares the 3A6000, featuring the same cores, to a variety of modern x86 cores:

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/running-spec-cpu2017-on-chinese-cpus
​

If you look further down the article, you can see a comparison that includes a Skylake i5-6600K. In that comparison the LA664 is 75.6% as fast on integer and 69.3% fast on floating point. Considering the 3E6000 has 64 cores, it only needs to be 62.5% as fast as Ice Lake, in order to equal the aggregate performance of a 40-core Intel 8380. That seems very plausible to me.

 

[bit_user]

So much western copium,
...
last i heard they just dipped into 2nm and the results were heading in the right direction.

You can't criticize one group for "copium" and then lap up such baseless PR drivel, at the same time. They have no indigenous capability even to do single-patterning 5 nm. Anything about 2 nm is pure hype.

 

[bit_user]

A couple of years ago, a well-renowned CPU-focused web site did quite detailed performance tests of the chips that LoongSon had then, and while the performance was not stellar, it was quite promising.

I'm 99% sure you're talking about this:

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/loongson-3a6000-a-star-among-chinese-cpus
​

I therefore see no reason to not believe that they could have evolved to the state that has been claimed now.

This CPU (the 3C6000) is based on the exact same LA664 core as used in the 3A6000 they reviewed in the above article (and benchmarked in the one I linked in my prior post).

They're just saying 64 of those cores is equal to 40 of Intel's ~6-year-old cores. That's definitely not a stretch.

 

[bit_user]

Impressive but will reserve judgement until I see one on Aliexpress or Alibaba with a motherboard ...

You can find tons of 3A6000 boards on AliExpress.

if the chips, motherboards and drivers play by the rules and don't phone home or anything other nasties, not long before we have viable alternative and for the buyer, prices crashing?

I'm not sure what distros are usable on it. They have upstreamed a lot of support for it, so it's conceivable you could run a non-Chinese distro on it, but maybe there are some critical pieces missing which prevent that. It'd be worth researching, before you take the plunge.

 

[bit_user]

This is outdated mindset. China added more solar power in a single month than the entire US solar capacity added in 2024. (source)

Oh, but they also lead the world in coal power.

China’s construction of new coal-power plants ‘reached 10-year high’ in 2024 - Carbon Brief

A “resurgence” in construction of new coal-fired power plants in China is “undermining the country’s...

www.carbonbrief.org

Two things can be true, at the same time.

I see your point... They use Coal power at night only.

According to whom? Or were you joking?

I doubt it, because that would not be economically viable.

 

[Eximo]

Solar systems, and other power systems, generally include batteries to account for clouds, sudden demand, and nighttime switch over to other sources. They may very well increase coal plant usage at night. But demand also lessens at a certain point and they might be able to coast with batteries, or pumped hydro, or normal hydro. And of course nuclear can take up some of the overnight load.

A liquid battery facility is on my way to work. No significant solar or wind nearby. Just there to keep things going while they spool up capacity somewhere else.

 

[Reace]

Im seriously starting to wonder if Tom's has been bought by the Chinese government. Every day some new BS story about some new phony breakthrough in China. 90% of greatly exaggerated or just outright false.

 

[thestryker]

Quad-channel seems awfully suspicious for a 64-core server CPU. Intel went beyond this to six-channel in 2017, when they launched the 28-core Skylake-EP.

I've been thinking about this and I'm wondering what the design of these looks like: is it like AMD Epyc/Intel GNR or is it like Intel SPR. If it's the former then I'd say it's probably just a bad choice of IO design (I would think putting 6 or 8 channel on everything even if it wasn't needed for the lower SKUs should have been the smart move). If it's the latter then maybe their memory controller design doesn't scale properly and so the best they can do is one channel per chiplet.

 

[thestryker]

Im seriously starting to wonder if Tom's has been bought by the Chinese government. Every day some new BS story about some new phony breakthrough in China. 90% of greatly exaggerated or just outright false.

While I understand healthy skepticism towards breakthroughs out of China without verification this isn't one of those times.

Loongson has been steadily improving their architecture and this article is about them comparing a 64 core CPU with a 40 core Intel CPU. That Intel CPU is 3 major architectures old now and made on a first (volume) generation Intel 10nm manufacturing process. With 60% more cores they're still not beating the Intel part universally so I'm not sure what's so unbelievable here.

 

[phead128]

Im seriously starting to wonder if Tom's has been bought by the Chinese government. Every day some new BS story about some new phony breakthrough in China. 90% of greatly exaggerated or just outright false.

This chip is released for commercial sale, literally anyone can buy it right now and test and confirm. So I really don't understand how it can be "outright false"?