Phytium claims to match Arm’s Neoverse N2 and Intel's Xeon Platinum 8330 speeds with its latest FTC870 Arm-based CPU

When it comes to proprietary x86-based CPU technology, China is still considerably lagging behind the Western world. The trade war between the U.S. and China has put quite a few restrictions on the world’s second largest economy, but despite ongoing sanctions that limit the import of U.S. tech, RISC-V-based and Arm-based processors produced in China are still evolving at a steady pace. As one of China’s leading Arm-based processor makers, Phytium recently presented its FTC870 CPU designed for servers and desktops, and the company claims it can match Arm’s own Neoverse N2 models or even Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380.

An ICSmart report shows one of Phytium’s slides presented at the 2023 Malanshan Integrated Circuit Application Innovation Forum, with the new FTC870 model positioned midway in a chart assessing integer and floating point performance. The FTC870 scores 5.73672 points in CINT2017 and 8.42 points in CFP2017. Arm’s Neovers N2 CPU is slightly faster in CINT2017 with 5.86 points, but significantly slower in CFP2017 with only 7.11 points, while the Intel Xeon 8380 processor is on par in CINT2017 and slightly ahead in CFP2017 with 8.65 points. If these metrics are indeed accurate, Phytium is now mostly on par with Western technology from 2 years ago, yet the new processor is only clocked at 3 GHz.

Phytium is also expected to launch a faster FTC871 processor soon. Extrapolating the performance delta between the FTC860 and FTC861 models, we could see at least 16% performance improvements for CINT2017 over the FTC870.

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