Chinese chipmaker Loongson's new 3B6600 and 3B7000 chips narrow performance gap with Intel and AMD offerings

In brief: Beijing was the setting for some bold claims from Loongson this week about its homegrown processor lineup. The Chinese tech firm says it has leveled up its CPU intellectual property in a big way, without relying on any third-party sources. It's an ambitious goal to take on the heavyweights of x86 and ARM with its "Dragon" architecture.

Loongson Vice President Zhang Ge revealed that the company has made huge strides in single-core performance through its R&D efforts. While admitting that its chips lag mainstream offerings in multi-core grunt, Loongson claims its latest iterations have seen up to a 20x gain in single-core capabilities.

The newly-launched 3B6600 and 3B7000 processors were shown off as examples of this progress. The mobile-focused 3B6600 packs eight LA864 cores ticking at 3GHz along with integrated "LG200" graphics. Meanwhile, the likely desktop-bound 3B7000 is slim on details other than a boost up to ...