According to a report from ITHome, Loongson Technology, one of China’s most prominent fabless chipmakers, has officially announced during its 2025 annual and 2026 Q1 earnings calls that the company’s highly anticipated next-generation 3B6600 processor and 9A1000 graphics chip are on track for the retail market in 2027. Although the 3B6600 and 9A1000 cannot hold a candle next to the best CPUs for gaming or best graphics cards, they reportedly achieve performance parity with Intel’s 12th Generation Alder Lake processors and AMD’s Radeon RX 550 graphics card, respectively.

Loongson began development of the 3B6600, the successor to the 3A6000, in 2024. Hu Weiwu, Chairman and General Manager of Loongson, recently confirmed that the 3B6600 has completed its design phase and is now ready for tape-out. The company anticipates that the 3B6600 will be delivered in the second half of the year, with plans to report the tape-out results at the Q3 earnings conference scheduled for October.

The 3B6600 represents a significant evolution over the previous 3A6000 series, not only in core architecture but also in performance and power efficiency. The 3B6600, which is still based on the LoongArch ISA but leveraging Loongson's latest LA864 execution cores, reportedly flaunts a 30% IPC improvement over the LA664 execution cores found inside the 3A6000.

The 3B6600 will max out at eight cores and 16 threads, with base and boost clock speeds of up to 2.5 GHz and 3 GHz, respectively. The Loongson chip will support DDR5 memory, PCIe 4.0, and HDMI 2.1. According to the manufacturer's early single-core SPEC CINT2006 benchmarks, the 3B6600 seemingly rivals Intel's Alder Lake Core i5 and Core i7 chips.

Meanwhile, the 9A1000 is an entry-level graphics card that reportedly achieves performance comparable to the aging Radeon RX 550. The development of the 9A1000 began in 2023, with the initial goal of bringing the product to market by 2025. However, the project appears to have encountered a series of challenges as Loongson taped out the 9A1000 chip in September 2025. During the recent earnings call, Weiwu stated that the 9A1000 is now in the final stages for delivery, and the company plans to share tape-out results at the upcoming 1H earnings call in August.

The 9A1000 is just a stepping stone for Loongson as the company has further plans for other segments of the graphics card market. Weiwu confirmed that the high-performance 9A2000 and 9A3000 graphics cards are already in the design stages.

According to the earnings call report, the 3B6600 processor and 9A1000 graphics card reportedly rely on a proprietary manufacturing process, which is why design, integration, and tape-out cycles are longer. The 3B6600 and 9A1000 leverage a mature 12nm process node, which is the magic number because you can still produce 12nm with DUV (Deep Ultraviolet) litography tools. Remember that China is cut off from EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) tools required for 7nm and below process nodes. Furthermore, 12nm is a very mature node, so production yields are high and sufficient to supply the large-scale Chinese market.

In addition to developing processors and graphics cards, Loongson is actively exploring new and ambitious ventures. During recent announcements, the company hinted at a potential strategic entry into the memory chip market, probably to ride the AI wave. To accelerate its progress, Loongson has seemingly established partnerships with other companies to co-develop logic silicon wafers for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips.

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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.