Chinese Hygon Processor Rivals Intel‘s Core i7-14700 in Benchmarks
Beijing – A new Chinese processor,the Hygon C86-4G,is generating buzz after benchmark results surfaced suggesting it can compete with-and in some tests,exceed-the performance of Intel’s Core i7-14700.The Hygon processor, developed through a joint venture between AMD and a Chinese partner, is based on AMD’s Zen architecture and represents a significant step in China’s efforts to develop its own domestic CPU capabilities.
The Hygon C86-4G, pictured in a 7490 version with a 3490 variant also appearing in tests, features 16 cores and 32 threads, supported by 32MB of L3 cache (2x16MB). It supports DDR5 memory and the PCIe 5.0 bus. CPU-Z data reveals 32kB instruction and data L1 caches per core, alongside 512kB L2 caches. While initial CPU-Z readings showed a clock speed of 1.2 GHz, benchmark results indicate strong performance in multi-threaded workloads.
However, the processor demonstrated weaker single-threaded performance, achieving 66% of the integer performance and 75% of the floating-point performance of the core i7-12700. Compared to the core i7-14700, it reached 58-66% in the same tests.
Despite this, the Hygon C86-4G excelled in multi-threaded tasks. It outperformed the Core i7-12700 by 57% in integer calculations, the i7-13700 by 22%, and even the i7-14700 by 4%.In floating-point calculations,it surpassed the i7-12700 by 39% and the i7-13700 by 8%,though falling short of the i7-14700 by 8%. Notably, the Hygon processor managed to outperform Intel processors with considerably higher core counts (20 cores/28 threads) despite its single-threaded limitations.
The benchmarks utilized the older SpecCPU2006 suite, raising questions about the testing methodology. The reported TDP initially displayed as 65535W was attributed to the limitations of a 16-bit unsigned integer variable. Further independent verification of these results is anticipated as the Hygon processor gains wider attention.
