U.S. technology restrictions have propelled China to build its own chip products, and Huawei's Mate 60 smartphone series is not the only example.

Loongson 3A6000, a computer CPU with China's own architecture, is as fast as Intel's i3 10100 released in 2020. To computer geeks, such performance is outdated, but the speed is still enough for a lot of daily tasks at home and at work.

CGTN tested a PC powered by the Loongson 3A6000 chip and it did live up to what the company claims. For about a week, the machine was used to write stories, browse the web and even play some video games. A benchmark software was also run to stress the CPU besides editing 4K videos. 

As it turns out, it beats many older Intel chips and is capable of professionally processing video files.

With that said, the PC is built on a new architecture called the LoongArch64, which is not supported by mainstream OS. So, users are stuck with open source software tailored for the chip, with some of the programs running extremely slow or totally unusable.

The Loongson chips are far from being able to become mainstream, but it is a solid step forward for China's own semiconductor industry.

On-camera reporter: Gong Zhe

Scriptwriter: Gong Zhe

Cameraman and video editor: Gong Zhe