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Zhaoxin's KX-7000
- vessenes 1y agoLove reading these highly detailed analyses. Short version: Zhaoxin's currently competitive with 2010/2011-era AMD and Intel, with some asterisks around RAM speed. There is to my mind a sort of race to get up to "fast enough to host H100 competitor AI hardware" with non-US IP that makes sense to engage in. In those terms, it looks like they're maybe 2 revs away -- I'm not sure what process node the KX7000 is on, but there's some architectural work to finish up. That said, this is interesting. I assume the chips will continue to improve from Zhaoxin, unless they lose their core team.
- chasil 1y ago"Zhaoxin did not specify what process node they’re using. Techpowerup and Wccftech suggests it uses an unspecified 16nm node."
- vessenes 1y agoThat’s pretty easily verified by a reasonably competent chip engineer and a microscope, if its 16 and they need to stay on shore only, they could be a little closer in terms of time than I speculated. SMIC at 7nm is reportedly stable; not sure about yields though. I think if I were in charge I’d probably do a final architecture spin at 16, and then shrink that one to 7 or 5 if I could get it.
- undefuser 1y agoIf the goal is to make a CPU that is "fast enough to host H100 competitor AI hardware", then why bother with x64? Huawei could have just produced a powerful ARM chip to go with their new AI processor. After all, Nvidia GB200 also uses Arm-based CPUs (the Grace in GB).
- daniel_iversen 1y agoThis is interesting! Does anyone know how China’s reliance on chips from intel and amd is in the non-AI space (so regular consumer and server loads)? I’m wondering how it was 10 and 5 years ago, now, and how we predict in the next couple of years. Surely if they’re not mostly using their own chips they will very soon right?
- daniel_iversen 1y ago[flagged]
- rjzzleep 1y agoThey push local chips for independence, but unless the west embargoes them, I don't think you will see a major leap forward. Huawei is a whole different beast though. They have a everything from the chip design up, and by now also an operating system that has arguably both a better frontend framework and a better kernel that the Linux alternatives. When we talk about Chinese AI chips being slow we specifically talk about classic desktop chips. Also! For normal desktop work a 2011 intel chip is plenty fast. A lot of critical systems like train booking systems are keyboard focused ancient UI systems, and they seem fine.
- MaxPock 1y agoIf Huawei had access to TSMC and free of sanctions,it would have run so many companies out of town.
- ksec 1y agoIgnoring Fabs for now which is a different sets of issues. They have JV with ARM ( ARM China ) and AMD ( Zen 1 ), IMG ( PowerVR and MIPS ) Along with investment on RISC-V. Alibaba and Huawei are all investing into RISC-V as well. Considering they dont sell CPU I wont be surprised if China one day give away RISC-V CPU design for free. Surprisingly ARM China issue is still somewhat unresolved and ARM now has a separate subsidiary inside China.
- RetroTechie 1y ago
- IncreasePosts 1y agoWhat's the deal with the municipal government being a partner in this project? Is that structure common in china? Is it just them giving VIA tax breaks and things, or are they more involved than that?
- fspeech 1y agoDo governments allow some of their employees to be highly compensated relative to others? Would someone with real expertise in chip development work for the government at what the government is willing to pay? I think the answer is no.
- wmf 1y agoThe Chinese government has definitely "bought back" some top talent from the US. It's probably a small number of people. I'm not sure why local governments would get involved although in general China has had a problem with too much investment and not enough places for it to go. It's not impossible that there are essentially local sovereign wealth funds.
- fspeech 1y agoThey work at companies or universities, and there is a "market" to look to for the pay scale.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoThis initiative seems to be a private company propped up by government funds rather than direct government employment. Think Lockheed Martin not DARPA.
- jenny91 1y agoYes, it's very common in China.
- Havoc 1y agoYeah. They know the chips aren’t commercially competitive so they just create artificial demand by making gov and state controlled entities buy it. Basically an attempt to bootstrap an industry brute force style
- Merrill 1y agoHow would use of the Kylin OS instead of Windows 11 affect the user's perception of performance?
- hulitu 1y ago> How would use of the Kylin OS instead of Windows 11 affect the user's perception of performance? Windows 11 is dog slow on corporate hardware. Linux, even with bloated KDE or Gnome, is much faster.
- hawflakes 1y agoMinor nit. Compound pinyin words shouldn’t use StudlyCaps so it should be “Lujiazui”
- powerapple 1y agoI think it should. Chinese language does not have the concept of word in writing, there is no space, and each character is a unit in writing. Pinyin was to mark pronunciations of each characters, it would be Lu Jia Zui, meaning 3 characters. Pinyin is not English. LuJiaZui would make it easier to pronounce if you don't know Pinyin. There is no standard way to write it though, maybe Lu-Jia-Zui, Lu'Jia'Zui, or Lu'jia'zui. The most confusing and would lead to wrong pronunciation version is Lujiazui.
- marcodiego 1y agoHmmm.. it maybe free from IME! Maybe the FSF want a word with them.
- haunter 1y agoNo IME but whatever unknown chinese rootkit? Out of the frying pan, into the fire
- marcodiego 1y agoI can reason about an "unknown chinese rootkit" as much as about an "unknown US rootkit".
- snvzz 1y agoNote there are competent RISC-V architectures in China which might already be faster at emulating x86 than the KX-7000 is at running it directly.
- orangeboats 1y agoNot just RISC-V, when it comes to performance the Loongson CPUs (with the LoongArch ISA) are likely the most competitive -- the IPC of Loongson 3A6000 is around that of 10th ~ 12th gen Intel CPUs! And 3A7000 is coming soon. Zhaoxin is China's answer to "what if we need a drop-in x86 replacement immediately?" It does not represent the frontier of CPU development in the country.
- happycube 1y agoIt's also not the only answer, one Chinese company has rights to Zen 1. (which shows just how close AMD was to bankruptcy)
- tempeler 1y agoRather than signaling AMD's bankruptcy, this could be seen as a strong indication of how heavily China is investing in legacy technologies. That's why I wouldn't be so quick to draw conclusions. China’s eagerness in this area doesn’t mean that the investments are efficient. What truly matters here is the ability to build a full ecosystem. They practically wiped Huawei off the global smartphone market simply by banning Google services on their devices.
- happycube 1y agoThe license was done in 2016, though. It does not cover any later versions, and even if it did it would be cut off due to export restrictions.
- kjs3 1y agoZhaoxin is China's answer to "what if we need a drop-in x86 replacement immediately?" Exactly this. China isn't going to be doing HPC on these, or building domestic clouds, or wooing gamers. This is a strategic project so Chinese users can continue to access the x86 ecosystem regardless of 'supply chain issues'.[1][2] And much of that ecosystem can get by with a fraction of the compute of the average gamer, it's just fine that it hits mediocre performance numbers, for now. [1] And, sure, some national pride. No harm in that. [2] No, "emulators!" is not the only answer.
- jkampman 1y agoThis review is an object lesson about why there is so much more to shipping a decent processor than making a CPU core with reasonable performance (and decent is being polite given that we are talking about Bulldozer-class single-threaded perf, which most folks were beyond thrilled to abandon when Zen arrived eight years ago.) The behavior of the memory controller is wild to see in this day and age. You really don't want to see latency that high in general, but especially not for a client processor. I'd really like to see how it behaves with a reasonably powerful GPU in a CPU-bound gaming workload relative to the competition (to simulate what one of these might see in an internet café setting, for instance). Power efficiency also seems truly dismal according to PCWatch: https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/column/hothot/1626253.html https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/column/hothot/1626253.ht... . In Cinebench MT, it's consuming about the same power as a Ryzen 5 5600G while delivering about 1/3 the performance, and the idle power is much higher than the Core i3-8100/R5 5600G to boot. That's not a huge issue for desktops, but it would not make a good foundation for a mobile system. Overall an improvement versus past Zhaoxin efforts but people shouldn't kid themselves about the quality of the overall package here. There is a long way to go.
- luyu_wu 1y agoAbsolutely a lomg way to go. Interestingly, the chip is rated to run at DDR4-3200 or DDR5, so it's strange C&C got half that. The power issues are likely from by modern standards pre-historical clocking behavior (single P-state to my understanding)!
- clamchowder 1y agoIt does clock ramp from 800 MHz idle to 3.2 GHz under load, with 900, 1000, 1100, 1300, 1500, 1800, 2200, and 2700 MHz steps in between until it hits 3.2 GHz after 71.6 ms. Article was getting long enough so I just left it at, it reaches 3.2 GHz and stays there even though the spec sheet says it should go higher. I remoted into the system for testing (Cheese/George had it), and he said it took 3-4 cold reboots for it to come up, and suspected memory wasn't training correctly. So I did all the testing without ever rebooting the system, because it might not come back up if I tried.
- gitroom 1y agoBeen interesting following Zhaoxin, but yeah, looks like there's still a mountain to climb before these chips hit the big time. Kinda wild they're still so far behind, but I get why China wants to push their own stuff anyway.
- mappu 1y agoI wonder if Zhaoxin's VIA heritage is helping them or holding them back - because of the patents, they were the only ones allowed to try, but since x86_64 and SSE2 are both now more than 20 years old, most of the patents don't matter any more (and AVX is not far from the cutoff). The breakaway ARM China or SpacemiT or Loongson could drop in an x86_64 frontend and might get better results.
- tempeler 1y agoit seems bad investment. firstly, it's an old architecure. secondly, How will they measure the efficiency of their investments?.Instead of investing in outdated architectures, they could fund universities, or support at least two or more companies in a competitive setup — that way, something much more efficient might emerge. But when a company is state-funded in a monopolistic way, it's quite hard for it to succeed. The U.S. had a reason for supporting AMD against Intel back then.
- ptx 1y agoThey are doing that as well. There's a lot of investment in RISC-V: https://asiatimes.com/2025/03/china-all-in-on-risc-v-open-source-chip-design/ https://asiatimes.com/2025/03/china-all-in-on-risc-v-open-so... For x86, supporting multiple companies would be more difficult, as they would need a license for the ISA (which Zhaoxin inherits from Via).
- tempeler 1y agorisc-v is much more reasonable for countries like china.What I want to emphasize is this: Instead of paying license fees for outdated x86 architectures, it would be much more beneficial to allocate those resources to universities. If you're paying for a license but can't generate a return on that investment quickly, then something is wrong.
- spookie 1y agoYou are completely misunderstanding China's goal. They want the expertise, being self-sufficient, while taking what they can so they don't start from 0. Risc-V is arguably risky, so they have their hands on everything at the same time so they're sure they have a winner. Markets don't matter. They want to develop the technology and have the talent to achieve it, fast.
- happycube 1y agoAs in the article, it doesn't have to be good. yet.
- cake-rusk 1y agoWhy does anyone still need to license the x86 ISA? Haven't all / sufficient number of patents expired by now?