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Comment by RetroTechie

2 years ago

> The 3A6000 is Loongson’s best and newest and performs between the level of Zen (GloFo 14-12nm) and Zen 2 (TSMC 7nm) but limited to four cores.

Which is fine. For most applications, it's the order of magnitude of performance that matters. Not +10..30% or say, Zen 3 vs. Zen 2 (although gamers & AMD/Intel execs will argue otherwise).

Machines with >10y old cpu's are still perfectly useable for (most) everyday tasks, as long as the software support is there. Especially when coupled with enough RAM, decent gpu, SSD etc.

On the way from "pointless museum piece" to "latest & greatest", this cpu is 9/10s there.

4 comments

RetroTechie

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klabb3  2 years ago

> it's the order of magnitude of performance that matters

Finally a sound voice in this merry go round of one-upping. Totally agree. The funny thing is, if people paid half as much attention to optimizing the bloat crap they build, instead of drooling over 10% cpu gains, you’d see a much bigger improvements. Obviously it depends on the domain, but everything I’ve come across (except core tech like SQLite etc) have huge overhead in both memory and cpu that could easily be optimized if someone paid attention.

Like the json parsing issue with gta online, that’s a perfect yet egregious example of software practices today.

lostmsu  2 years ago

I think you missed the "limited to 4 cores" part. Zen 2 has up to 64, which considering it is also slower per core makes it 20 times slower. If like me you count 2x as order of magnitude, that's 4+ orders of magnitude away.