Chinese Phytium's New CPU Claimed To Rival Arm's Neoverse N2

Phytium
(Image credit: Phytium)

Phytium has unveiled its latest high-performance processor core, FTC870, at the 2023 Malanshan Integrated Circuit Application Innovation Forum. The company claims that its FTC870 can rival Arm's Neoverse N2 cores in CINT2017 and CFP2017 benchmarks, according to ICSmart. This is a significant achievement for Phytium, which cannot access technologies developed in the USA due to U.S. government sanctions.

Phytium's FTC870 clocked at 3.0 GHz scores 5.73672 points in CINT2017 (a benchmark that tests the integer performance of CPUs) and 8.42688 points in CFP2017 (a benchmark that tests floating point performance of CPUs). By contrast, Arm's Neoverse N2 at 3.0 GHz hits 5.8608 points in CINT2017 and 7.11 points in CFP2017, whereas Intel's Xeon Scalable 8380 scores 5.73 points in CINT2017 as well as 8.65 points in CFP2017. Keep in mind that we are dealing with performance numbers from the company itself, so take them with a grain of salt. 

(Image credit: ICSmart)

FTC870 is Phytium's top-of-the-range offering for high-performance CPUs aimed at servers and desktops. By contrast, Arm's Neoverse N2 is the company's core aimed at edge and cloud servers. For high-performance computing (HPC), Arm has Neoverse V-series cores, which cannot be licensed to Chinese companies due to restrictions imposed by the U.S. government concerning performance. Meanwhile, it would be logical for Phytium to compare performance of its FTC870 to that of Neoverse V-series, though Phytium is also prepping more capable FTC871 core.

Phytium was added to the U.S. Department of Commerce's Entity List in 2021 and since then it cannot access advanced American technologies, including Arm's CPU cores that are designed (and manufactured) using technologies that originate from the U.S. Despite facing developmental hurdles because of the U.S. restrictions, the new core demonstrates remarkable advancement showcasing performance levels that rival and even surpass Arm's Neoverse N2 core. 

Yet, it has taken Phytium over two years to develop its FTC870, so it remains to be seen whether the company can release new CPUs fast enough to stay competitive against its rivals.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

Read more
Phytium
Chinese chipmaker Phytium sells over 10 million homegrown CPUs — Feiteng processors are primarily used in national projects and key local industries
Loongson 3B6600 CPU news
Chinese chipmaker claims new Loongson 3B6600 CPU could hit 13th-Gen Intel performance
Image of a processor on a motherboard.
China's SpacemiT develops 64-core RISC-V datacenter CPU — 12nm chip allegedly performs like a 10-year old Xen or Opteron but with higher core count
Zhaoxin's KX-7000 CPU.
Chinese CPU maker Zhaoxin rolls out DeepSeek support to all processors — entire product lineup now runs DeepSeek LLMs natively
Arm
Arm to launch first self-made processors, poaching employees from clients: Reports
Image of a processor on a motherboard.
Alibaba launches RISC-V-based XuanTie C930 server CPU — AI/HPC chip ships this month, more designs to follow
Latest in CPUs
Core Ultra 200S CPU
An Arrow Lake refresh may still be in the cards with only K and KF models, claims leaker
Tech Deals
Our alternate pick for the best gaming CPU is $190 cheaper than the 9800X3D right now - pick up the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X for just $289
ASRock fixes AM5 motherboard by cleaning it
ASRock claims to fix 'burned out' AM5 motherboard by cleaning the socket
Ryzen AI
AMD's Gorgon Point APU line-up breaks cover — Allegedly aiming for a 2026 launch
Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300
The week in chip news: Nvidia's GTC 2025 blitz, new NVMe HDDs and watercooled SSD, Intel's restructuring begins
AMD
Zen 5-based Threadripper 9000 CPU shipping manifest hints at imminent launch
Latest in News
Inspur
US expands China trade blacklist, closes susidiary loopholes
Qualcomm
Qualcomm launches global antitrust campaign against Arm — accuses Arm of restricting access to technology
Nvidia Ada Lovelace and GeForce RTX 40-Series
Analyst claims Nvidia's gaming GPUs could use Intel Foundry's 18A node in the future
Core Ultra 200S CPU
An Arrow Lake refresh may still be in the cards with only K and KF models, claims leaker
RX 9070 XT Sapphire
Lisa Su says Radeon RX 9070-series GPU sales are 10X higher than its predecessors — for the first week of availability
RTX 5070, RX 9070 XT, Arc B580
These are the best GPU 'deals' based on real-world scalper pricing and our FPS per dollar test results
  • bit_user
    So, it seems like these cores are implementing ARMv8-A.

    Keeping in mind that this announcement is of the FTC870, here's what the original article says (via Google Translate):
    "Originally, according to the plan, Feiteng would launch the Tengyun S5000 series based on the FTC860 self-developed core of the ARMv8.2 instruction set architecture in the third quarter of 2021, with up to 80 cores, 1MB of L1 cache per core, and 64MB of shared L3 cache. It supports eighth-channel DDR5-4800 memory, 64-channel PCIe5.0, dual-channel/four-channel parallel, etc., and its performance is said to be comparable to Intel Xeon Platinum 8280."
    They didn't say anything about how this new core is expected to be used, nor what process node it's made on. They did mention that, in mid-2020, they were using 16 nm.

    BTW, if anyone has more information on these benchmarks they ran, I'd be interested to hear it.
    Reply
  • jp7189
    bit_user said:
    So, it seems like these cores are implementing ARMv8-A.

    Keeping in mind that this announcement is of the FTC870, here's what the original article says (via Google Translate):
    "Originally, according to the plan, Feiteng would launch the Tengyun S5000 series based on the FTC860 self-developed core of the ARMv8.2 instruction set architecture in the third quarter of 2021, with up to 80 cores, 1MB of L1 cache per core, and 64MB of shared L3 cache. It supports eighth-channel DDR5-4800 memory, 64-channel PCIe5.0, dual-channel/four-channel parallel, etc., and its performance is said to be comparable to Intel Xeon Platinum 8280."
    They didn't say anything about how this new core is expected to be used, nor what process node it's made on. They did mention that, in mid-2020, they were using 16 nm.

    BTW, if anyone has more information on these benchmarks they ran, I'd be interested to hear it.
    1MB of L1 per core?! That would be 80MB L1 for the proposed CPU. They must mean L2.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    jp7189 said:
    1MB of L1 per core?! That would be 80MB L1 for the proposed CPU. They must mean L2.
    Yeah, agreed. Not only would the sizes make more sense, but it's also weird to jump straight from L1 to L3, saying nothing about L2. Plus, L1 cache is often segmented and not publicized as widely (but it's not hard to find stats on how big everyone's is).
    Reply