Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks: How China's LoongArch CPU Compares To AMD Zen 5, Intel Arrow Lake & Raspberry Pi 5
There are two DDR4 memory slots on this Loongson-3B6000x1-7A2000x1-EVB motherboard. The DDR4 memory compatibility is a bit finicky compared to your typical AMD or Intel desktop motherboard. SK Hynix or Kingston DDR4 Registered ECC DIMMs at 3200MT/s are what's recommended. And in the case of SK Hynix DIMMs, ECC controllers from Montage rather than IDT. I happened to get lucky and on my second shot found 2 x 32GB Micron DDR4-3200 Registered DIMMs from an old AMD EPYC server that worked fine with this LoongArch system.
Aside from worrying about compatible DDR4 Registered ECC memory, the rest of the build for my first LoongArch system went well. Powering on provides a basic BIOS/firmware screen similar to what you would find with an AMD or Intel desktop system.
Then came the matter of the Linux OS support. There are a limited number of Linux distributions officially supporting LoongArch64. Given my past LoongArch64 news coverage I decided to go with Debian given it's had a LoongArch64 port for a while and Debian 14 is looking at official LoongArch64 support.
This Loongson 3B6000 booted fine via EFI to the LoongArch64 Debian 13 port net installer. From there it was possible to proceed with the Debian net install just like on any other architecture. The ISO didn't recognize the integrated dual Gigabit Ethernet on the motherboard, so I ended up connecting a USB Gigabit Ethernet adapter to the system that was detected just fine by the Debian LoongArch64 installer.
👁 Loongson 3B6000 system setup
It's great having UEFI booting with LoongArch and not having to worry about any Device Tree troubles with this system or the like.
👁 Loongson 3B6000 system built
After the install process, it was a smooth boot-up and into the Debian LoongArch world. While much of the Debian package set is available for LoongArch64, not all packages are available - including some key packages. At least as of writing there were issues trying to install cmake and various other common packages due to missing dependencies. So that reduced the number of benchmarks that could be run for this initial comparison and for some packages just compiling manually from source to workaround the incomplete Debian archive.
👁 Loongson 3B6000 Debian issue
In a follow-up article I'll be trying other LoongArch Linux distributions too on this Loongson 3B6000 with just going for Debian. But aside from that it worked out fine as an initial hands-on with this LoongArch system.
Unfortunately there is no CPU PowerCap/RAPL support or other HWMON driver or similar for exposing the CPU power consumption of the Loongson 3B6000 under Linux. As such it's not possible to compare the CPU power consumption in any accurate manner for this round of testing unlike with modern AMD and Intel processors where there is such monitoring support. I was also going to monitor the wall power using the WattsUp Pro but the utility was failing to compile for LoongArch.
For the initial reference points of the Loongson 3B6000 performance are the following configuraitons:
- Intel Core Ultra 5 245K
- Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
- AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
- AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
- AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
- AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
- AMD Ryzen 9 9900X
- AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D
- AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
- AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
- Raspberry Pi 500+
👁 Loongson 3B6000 motherboard PCB
Again, testing of older Intel/AMD processors for more applicable comparisons of this DDR4-backed Loongson 3B6000 will be coming in a follow-up article on Phoronix as well as having more benchmarks in seeing what other software I can bring-up on LoongArch 64-bit and how other distributions compare to Debian Loong64.