Recently, two exciting chips have appeared in the domestic chip field.
The first is the Loongson 3A6000 chip, which has been successfully tape-out and will be on the market soon. It is said that the performance of the chip is completely comparable to the 10th generation Core and 7nm AMD Zen2 chips, with the potential to replace Intel and AMD.
The other is Huawei's Kirin 9000S chip, which is seen as a breakthrough product using the 7nm process, which is significant after four years of suppression.
So the question is, can these two chips be compared to see who is stronger?
However, everyone also knows that Huawei Kirin 9000S is a mobile phone chip, that is, System on Chip (SoC), which includes CPU, GPU, NPU, DSP, ISP and baseband chips. The Kirin 9000S should be compared with other chips such as Qualcomm, Apple, and MediaTek.
The Loongson 3A6000 is a computer chip that contains only the CPU, which needs to be compared with other chips such as Intel and AMD. Theoretically, the two chips simply cannot be directly compared, after all, they belong to different types.
However, if you insist on comparison, there is a way.
One way to do this is to use the indicator IPC (Instructions Per Clock), which indicates the number of instructions executed by the CPU in each clock cycle. IPC represents the design architecture of the CPU, and the higher the IPC value, the better the design level of the chip.
Testing the Kirin 9000S with SPEC CPU 2006 shows that its IPC is between 13+/G at a fixed point, that is, the performance per GHz is between 13 and 14.
The IPC of the Loongson 3A6000 chip reaches a fixed point of 17+/G, which obviously far exceeds the Kirin 9000S, and the performance is increased by more than 20%.
If you use SPEC CPU 2017 for testing, the IPC of the Huawei Kirin 9000S reaches a fixed point of 1.58, while the IPC of the Loongson 3A6000 reaches a fixed point of 2.08, which is 30% higher than Loongson.
This shows that Loongson's design level is very powerful, and the CPU architecture design is excellent after adopting the self-developed instruction set LoongArch. Although Loongson's process is only 12 nanometers, more than one generation behind the Kirin 9000S, the IPC has improved by 20-30%.
Of course, as mentioned earlier, Kirin 9000S and Loongson 3A6000 are not the same type of chip, and comparing them is just to satisfy everyone's curiosity.
Whether it is Loongson or Qilin, it is an excellent chip in China. However, these two chips still have a lot of room for improvement in design, after all, Loongson only uses the 12-nanometer process, while the Kirin 9000S is equivalent to the 7-nanometer process, which can only be compared with the Qualcomm chip three years ago.
It is hoped that in the future, domestic chips can continue to make breakthroughs in design and foundry, so that domestic chips can enter the real golden age and comprehensively surpass foreign products.
