Loongson Says Its Next-Gen 3B6600 CPUs Will Compete Against Mid & High-End Intel 12th & 13th Gen Chips, Will Feature iGPU

Loongson will follow the “Tick-Tock” evolutionary path for its next-gen products: Reaches 12th/13th gen Intel CPU performance with its 3B6600 CPU.

The Chinese hardware manufacturer Loongson has announced some important updates at the Loongson Industrial Ecosystem Conference, where its chairman, Hu Weiwu introduced three big product lineups. These are the high-performance general-purpose CPUs, GPUs, and SoCs/MCU microcontrollers aimed at competing with modern hardware from major chip manufacturers such as Intel and AMD.

At the conference, the chairman pointed out that the company has finally completed the performance catch-up in its two decades of development and will continue to do so with the Tick-Tock path, which is used by Intel for its CPU lineups.

The latest Loongson 3A6000 CPU built on the 14nm process node is already comparable to some of the older-gen Intel and AMD processors as we have seen before. Even though the performance isn’t on par with the modern mid-range and flagship CPUs, the path ahead seems to be promising.

As per the chairman, the company is set to launch the “3B6600” CPU will compete against its x86 rival chips from Intel and AMD. As per the claims, the 3B6600 will be as powerful as the mid-range and high-end Intel 12th and 13th-generation processors. This alone will keep the 3B6600 ahead of 50% of the desktop CPU market. The company will also introduce new variants such as 3A6600 for PCs, 3C6600 for servers and a range of new portfolio additions.

Similarly, the company is set to reveal a solid entry-level desktop graphics card, “9A1000” GPGPU(General-Purpose GPU) that will be offering Radeon RX 550-equivalent performance and will feature 128-bit LPDDR4X memory. The GPU will be launched in the first half of 2025 and will be succeeded by the company’s most powerful 9A2000 GPU, which the company claims to offer RTX 2080 performance.

With support for AI computing and features like OpenGL 4.0, PCI-E 4.0, and various modern outputs like HDMI 2.1, and DP 2.1, the GPU 9A1000 is going to offer itself as a cost-effective solution. As for its embedded SoC and MCU, the company has already developed four product generations to reach mainstream markets.

Its 2K1500 and 2K2000 models, based on the LoongArch cores offered a drastic increase in performance over the predecessors while remaining ultra-power-efficient at just 2.8W and 4W respectively. The Loongsoon 2K3000 is going to reduce the power consumption to just under 1W while offering much better performance than the Loongson 1A/1B/C series. As of now, the 2K3000 is already taped out and will feature 8 cores with a clock frequency of over 2.0GHz. Coupled with the iGPU, the total power consumption of the chipset will be kept under 15W.

Loongson is now focusing on building its software ecosystem, which will be completed in three phases. The first phase is building a Linux-based software ecosystem along with x86 and Arm, and is almost complete. The second phase will focus on wider compatibility and the third phase will be the development of native applications.

Loongson can develop its chips without any need for foreign licenses as it has its own instruction set architecture(ISA). This makes it independent of Wintel(Windows + Intel) and AA(likely referring to Arm + AMD). While the company isn’t anywhere near Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA in offering leading performance, it’s very close to its objective of closing the performance gap in a couple of years.