China Made Loongson 12-Core Chip Shows Wide Performance Gap In Linux Benchmarks

China made Loongson 12-core chip has finally appeared in independent Linux benchmarks, offering a rare look at how the country’s domestic desktop silicon stacks up against modern Western processors. The results suggest progress in self-sufficiency, but they also underline how far performance still lags behind mainstream alternatives.

The processor in question, the Loongson 3B6000, is not typically seen outside China. These chips are usually deployed in government systems and controlled environments designed to reduce reliance on foreign technology. This time, however, a unit reached the Linux benchmarking site Phoronix through the Loongson Hobbyists Community, allowing broader scrutiny.

Testing was carried out on a modest micro-ATX evaluation board labelled 3B6000x1-7A2000x1-EVB. The platform offered limited expansion, basic memory support, and a standard Linux software environment. From there, the chip was run through a broad selection of benchmarks, ranging from synthetic CPU tests to real-world applications, including workloads that use vector-style instructions similar to AVX-512.

On paper, the 3B6000 looks competitive in one respect. It carries 12 CPU cores, a count that would normally place it well into midrange desktop territory. In practice, clock speed proved to be a major constraint. The chip operates at roughly 2.5GHz, far below the 5GHz-class frequencies reached by current AMD and Intel desktop processors.

That limitation showed up clearly in the results. Across dozens of Linux benchmarks, the Loongson processor consistently trailed behind Western chips. The comparison that drew the most attention was against AMD’s Ryzen 5 9600X. Despite having only six cores and twelve threads, the Ryzen chip regularly outperformed the 12-core Loongson by a wide margin.

On average, the 3B6000 was about three times slower than the Ryzen 5 9600X in the Phoronix test suite. In most cases, it landed at the bottom of the chart, occasionally showing strength in niche workloads but unable to maintain competitive performance overall.

The only system the Loongson chip reliably surpassed was the quad-core ARM processor used in the Raspberry Pi 500. That places China’s current high-end desktop CPU above hobbyist-class ARM hardware, yet well behind mid-range consumer processors widely available today.

For now, the benchmarks paint a mixed picture. The Loongson 3B6000 demonstrates that China can produce complex, multi-core desktop processors, but it also highlights the significant performance gap that remains in everyday computing tasks.