Chinese company makes x86 chip as powerful as Intel Core i7 Raptor Lake

Thunderobot brand has just officially launched the first PC Gaming line using the Chinese-made Hygon C86 CPU at an eSports tournament.

This Thunderobot gaming PC model was unexpectedly launched with a Chinese-made Hygon C86 CPU, with surprisingly comparable performance to the Intel Core i7 Raptor Lake.

It's a new 16-core processor from Hygon — a Chinese foundry using AMD's first-generation Zen architecture — that has appeared on Geekbench. It offers 60 percent better performance than the same eight-core Hygon processor that was released earlier.

In a new social media post, THUNDEROBOT claims that it has created: “a new breed, reshaping the future of esports !” Instead of using the familiar processing solutions of Team Red or Blue, the company’s new “Black Warrior Hunter Pro” system focuses on the company’s own “next-generation C86 processor.”

Curious tournament attendees got their hands on THUNDEROBOT’s latest gaming system. A blurry screenshot of CPU-Z outlined the basic specs of the dual Hygon C86-4G chip: a base clock of 2.8 GHz, 16 cores, 32 threads, along with 32 MB of L3 cache.

This hot processor is apparently new enough to run DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 standards, and Valorant and Black Myth Wukong versions were running on the rigs on display.

The Hygon C86's real-world power also comes as a big surprise, with dedicated tests like SPEC 2006 and V-Ray showing its performance falling between Intel's Core i7-13700 and Core i7-14700.

Current speculation suggests that Hygon is using a Zen core design in the C86-4G, although the company's latest roadmap shows that the C86-4G uses a "new, in-house developed microarchitecture." The C86-4G operates at a clock speed of 2.8GHz, which is lower than AMD's first-generation Zen processors.

Hygon may have found a way to port AMD's Zen chiplets to a newer I/O Die (IOD) block equipped with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 controllers. Benchmark comparisons show performance in the range of Raptor Lake (-S and -R) generation CPUs. Wccftech suggests a middle ground between Intel's Core i7-13700 and i7-14700 models.

The Hygon C86 also surprised a lot when performing specialized tests such as V-Ray. This tool performs rendering tests on 3D scene models to measure the processing speed of the CPU and graphics card. This shows that their hardware configuration, especially the CPU and graphics card, shows a strong response to the needs of rendering 3D video .

Official product images show an NVIDIA GeForce RTX card inside, while some renders show a dual-slot motherboard, suggesting there may be multiple GPU options. Thunderobot has yet to share full specifications or pricing for the Black Warrior Hunter Pro. Overclocking capabilities, power limits, and exact memory configurations for retail models.