Made in China x86 CPU arrives to market

guest · Feb 2, 2020

Made in China 8-core x86 CPU arrives to market
The country is making strides in semiconductor self-reliance
February 2, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/83819-made-china-8-core-x86-cpu-arrives-market.html

Why it matters: Zhaoxin, a fabless chip maker based in Shanghai, has produced a homegrown x86 CPU line that's apparently ready for the DIY scene. The Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-6000 series of processors were originally shown off in 2018, but since then we had heard little about them. Now it seems that the KX-U6780A will come to market this quarter, as listed on Chinese retail site Taobao with a March release date.

Recently, a Chinese tech YouTube channel got a hold of a KX-U6780A and C1888 mini-ITX motherboard combination. Looking specifically at the KX-U6780A, the chip has a 70W TDP, a dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory controller, DirectX 11 support, modern I/O interfaces such as SATA, USB, and PCIe 3.0, with 8MB of L2 cache. Notably, the chip has no L3 cache.

According to Zhaoxin, the performance of the KX-6000 series should be similar to an Intel Core i5-7400, a 4C/4T Kaby Lake chip that launched in early 2017.
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While Zhaoxin's KX-6000 series remain way behind the likes of Intel and AMD's current crop of processors, Zhaoxin has aggressive plans to bridge that gap by 2021.
The upcoming KX-7000 series are set to be built on one of TSMC's 7nm nodes and will bring support for DDR5, PCIe 4.0, as well as boasting a refined iGPU.

China's home brewing of semiconductors seems to be advancing rapidly, especially as the country is attempting to wean itself off of American semiconductors.
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guest · Apr 12, 2020

Latest Zhaoxin x86 CPUs tested: This is what China closing the gap looks like
The company may be one architecture away from becoming a global player
April 12, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/84789-latest-zhaoxin-x86-cpus-tested-what-china-closing.html

The big picture: It's no secret that China has been working to reduce its reliance on American technology, hence its decision to commit no less than $29 billion to homegrown intellectual property around semiconductors. The country also plans to replace all foreign hardware and software from its public infrastructure and institutions in favor of local alternatives by 2022.

It should be noted that Zhaoxin is not the first, but rather the culmination of a relationship between the two entities that started in 2013 and has supplied various local clients to this day.
Zhaoxin's KaiXian KX-U6780A isn't something that you'll be able to buy outside of China anytime soon, but it paints an important picture of the progress made by a company that flew under everyone's radar for much of its existence.

The 8-core CPU is the second-fastest in Zhaoxin's latest lineup and is based on the LuJiaZui architecture, which itself is an evolution of the WuDaoKou architecture.
The new processor is built by TSMC on a 16nm FinFET process node and can operate at up to 2.7 GHz.
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Still, it's a big step for Zhaoxin. The folks over at Tom's Hardware were able to get their hands on the KaiXian-U6780A processor and the HX002EH1 development board.

You get 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes and support for up to 64 GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, and a custom, ZX-C960 iGPU that supports DirectX 11, OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL 3.2, and accelerated H.264 and HEVC encoding and decoding.
When Tom's Hardware compared the single threaded and multi-threaded Cinebench scores of these chips, it found that a lack of hyper-threading and frequency boosting abilities places the Zhaoxin CPU at a severe disadvantage.
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Zhaoxin's latest CPUs aren't in a position to challenge Intel and AMD, but it's important to note that the company has been quick in narrowing the gap.
The Chinese company is also aiming at the workstation, server, and HPC markets with the KH-40000 series, which will comprise 32-core chips that would could potentially go against AMD's Epyc and Intel's Xeon CPU families.
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