China's local CPUs are catching up with international manufacturers: Loongson 3B6600 and Huawei Kirin Tiancai

The semiconductor industry is vertical

2024-04-29 07:09Posted in Beijing Science and Technology Creators

THIS ARTICLE IS SYNTHESIZED BY THE SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY (ID: ICVIEWS).

China's local CPUs and GPUs continue to make efforts, and Loongson and Huawei are expected to stand out.

Recently, the CEO of Loongson revealed the company's next-generation 8-core CPU products for the Chinese market, the 3B6600 and 3B7000. Both CPUs are designed for the mainstream market, emphasizing single-core performance over multi-core performance.

Loongson says it's a 20-fold boost compared to the company's previous processors. We have already seen the 3A6000 in action, with IPC levels close to AMD's Zen 4 and Intel's Raptor Lake.

The 3B6600 has eight LA854 CPU cores and one LG200 GPU core clocked at 3.0 GHz. The 3B7000 CPU also has 8 LA864 cores clocked at 3.5 GHz.

According to the information provided by the company, the 3B7000 supports PCIe 4.0, SATA III, USB 3.0, GMAC, and HDMI outputs. It also integrates with the INT8 Tensor accelerator for LLM workloads. It also supports OpenCL 3.0 compute and OpenGL 4.0 graphics acceleration. Its on-chip GPU can achieve up to 256 GFLOPs of computing performance, and with a standalone graphics solution, it can achieve 1TFlops of computing power. But a mini PC with a 3A6000 CPU only supports 4K@30Hz. As a result, this iGPU may lack some features and support. Interestingly, it seems to support multiple RAM interfaces, such as SRAM, SDRAM, DDR2, and DDR3, as well as DDR4.

Loongson's efforts are aimed at making the Dragon architecture a top-of-the-line architecture alongside X86 and ARM. The IPC vs Loongson CPU comparison reminds me of Pat Gelsinger's comment that CPUs made in China are decades behind. But with companies like Loongson making such progress, one wonders if China's local chipmakers can close the gap within 10 years.

Loongson is vigorously promoting computers equipped with Loongson, and it is reported that nearly 10,000 Loongson 3A5000 computers have entered the classrooms of Hebi primary and secondary schools, pre-installed with UOS operating system and WPS office software.

On the evening of February 28, Loongson Zhongke released the "2023 Annual Performance Express Announcement", saying that it achieved operating income of 508 million yuan last year, a decrease of 31.18% from the previous year. Loongson Zhongke believes that the decline in operating income is mainly due to changes in the macroeconomic environment and industry cycles, as well as the temporary stagnation of procurement caused by internal management matters of some customers, and the e-government market is in a period of adjustment and has not yet been increased.

In 2023, Loongson Zhongke will achieve a net profit attributable to the owners of the parent company of -329.3217 million yuan, a decrease of 736.35% from 51.752 million yuan in the previous year, turning from profit to loss, and a net profit attributable to the owners of the parent company after deducting non-profits of -441.7431 million yuan, an increase of 284.9653 million yuan from the loss of the previous year, and a loss increase of 181.76%.

The Huawei Taishan V130 core is comparable to the Apple M3

According to Weibo users, Huawei's chip development department is also developing the next generation of PC Kirin processors in addition to the HiSilicon Kirin 9010 smartphone application processor. The segment will feature the company's next-generation general-purpose cores and improved GPUs. Huawei reportedly hopes the new Kirin will be able to compete with Apple's M3 in multi-threaded workloads.

Huawei's upcoming HiSilicon Kirin processors are expected to be equipped with eight general-purpose Arm cores, including four next-generation high-performance Tarzan V130 cores (the Kirin 9000s uses Tarzan V120 cores) and four energy-efficient cores. The system-on-chip is expected to integrate the company's next-generation Mailiang 920 GPUs with 10 clusters, a significant performance boost compared to the Kirin 910s with 4 clusters of Mailiang 910 GPUs.

According to reports, the new Kirin processor will support up to 32GB of memory, suggesting that it will offer a 5-bit interface for LPDDR5/LPDDR5X or DDR128 SDRAM.

Overall, Huawei expects the HiSilicon Kirin SoC for its next-generation client PCs to deliver multi-threaded performance close to Apple's M3 and graphics performance close to Apple's M2. However, it's unclear how the next-generation Kirin processors for desktops and laptops will stack up against Intel's 16-core Core Ultra 9 185H (6P, 8E, 2LP) platform, which powers Huawei's latest Matebook X Pro laptop.

There's no doubt that Huawei's next-generation Kirin processors for client PCs look quite impressive. It remains to be seen whether its performance will be on par with Apple's M3 or M2, but the tech giant's ambitions are clear.

According to sources, Huawei HiSilicon may release a higher-performance "Pro" and "Max" configuration Kirin SoC, similar to Apple, with a more versatile core, improved GPU, and a more comprehensive memory interface.

Given that Huawei doesn't control 8%~10% of the global PC market like Apple, it may not make sense to build higher-end Kirin processors for desktops and laptops. However, as China aims to become self-sufficient in semiconductors, Huawei's high-performance Kirin processors could help replace AMD and Intel's high-end components, which come from PCs used by various government agencies. From this point of view, it is strategically feasible for the company to undertake such an effort.

The only question is whether Huawei's local foundry partners have enough leading capacity to manufacture the chips Huawei needs.

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