China's homegrown Hygon CPU posts performance on par with Intel's Core i7-14700

Powered by AMD's Zen architecture

by · TechSpot

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The takeaway: Chinese PC maker Thunderobot has unveiled a gaming rig running on the homegrown Hygon C86-4G CPU, a chip that early benchmarks suggest can trade blows with Intel's Raptor Lake Core i7 lineup. The machine runs Windows 11 and can handle popular AAA titles like Valorant and Black Myth: Wukong, signaling a potentially huge leap for China's domestic PC ecosystem.

CPU-Z screenshots posted on Chinese social media confirm the processor has OPN code 3490 and features 16 cores, 32 threads, 32 MB of L3 cache, and a 2.8 GHz base clock. Curiously, it also shows an absurd 55,535W TDP, so it's unclear how accurate the rest of the specifications are.

The PC supports DDR5 memory, PCIe 5.0 expansion, and uses a closed loop water cooling solution with an all-copper heat spreader and indium-based thermal paste. The rest of the specifications have not been released, but official images depict multiple unidentified Nvidia RTX graphics cards, suggesting there will be more than one GPU option.

Benchmarks published by Thunderobot suggest that the C86-4G's performance is comparable to that of Intel's Core i7-13700 and i7-14700 Raptor Lake processors, but there's a significant difference between the chip's single-core and multi-core performance.

While the C86-4G's single-core scores are lower than the numbers racked up by the three-year-old Core i7-12700, the multi-core results are more impressive, showing higher integer and floating-point scores compared to the Core i7-13700. The integer benchmark of the C86-4G is actually higher than that of the Core i7-14700, suggesting robust multi-core performance.

It is worth noting that one of the two apps used for the comparisons - SPEC CPU 2006 - is outdated and was officially retired in January 2018. However, the other one, V-Ray, is an industry-standard application to evaluate a PC's rendering performance.

While the Chinese media is touting the C86-4G as a locally-developed CPU, Western tech media reports speculate that it could be a reworked AMD processor with Zen-based core architecture. The company is the official licensee for AMD's Zen IP in China through a long-standing joint venture and had showcased the server-grade C86-5G chip with Zen-derived cores back in May.

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Thunderobot has yet to reveal pricing and availability details of the Black Warrior Hunter Pro, but we expect it to be competitively priced compared to similar offerings featuring Intel or AMD chips. However, Hygon processors and devices powered by them will very likely be limited to China, so don't expect to get your hands on them any time soon.