Zhaoxin’s Homegrown CPUs Power Full Range of x86 PCs For China – 16nm Chips With Up To 8 Cores For Chinese Consumer Desktops, Notebooks & AIOs

Hassan Mujtaba
China's Domestic Zhaoxin KH-4000 16 Core CPU Offers Single-Core Performance Close To AMD's 1st Gen Zen Chips 1

Zhaoxin is ready to enter the domestic (Chinese) consumer market with its homegrown x86 CPUs, the KaiXian KX-6000 series. The CPUs will be used by Chinese ODM, IP3 Technology, in more than 50 products which include desktop PCs, notebook PCs, all-in-ones, Mini PCs & even industrial machines.

Zhaoxin's Homegrown x86 CPU Powered Consumer PCs Unveiled For The Chinese Market - Up To 50 Products Featuring 16nm CPUs

The Zhaoxin x86 CPU powered product portfolio was announced by IP3 Technology (Yingzhong Technologies) at an event hosted by the ODM. As mentioned above, there are a range of PC devices that will make use of Zhaoxin's KX-6000 series processors which are the only chips besides AMD & Intel to make use of an x86 architecture. While several products were showcased, IP3 Technology didn't unveil their respective specifications and prices yet.

Related Story China’s A.I. Powered Robot Nearly Fights Back After Being Hit, Pulled By Trainer 
Image Credits: Weixin.QQ

Following is a statement from Zhaoxin on the partnership with IP3 Technology and the launch of its first homegrown CPU powered consumer products in the Chinese market:

At present, the wave of new infrastructure is emerging, and the industry development is ushering in a new round of opportunities. Zhaoxin sincerely hopes to further deepen cooperation with Yingzhong Technology, and at the same time work together with ecological partners in the upstream and downstream links of the industry chain to promote technological breakthroughs and Product innovation helps new infrastructure and rapid industrial development. - Zhao Jian (Deputy General Manager, Shanghai Zhaoxin

Zhaoxin's Fastest Octa & Quad-Core CPUs Detailed

The Zhaoxin KX-6000 series was launched earlier this year and comes in 8 core and 4 core flavors. The 16nm architecture features no support for SMT but aims to deliver competitive pricing.

The top model for the 8 core lineup is the KX-U6880A which features 8 cores, 8 threads, a clock speed of up to 3.0 GHz, PCIe 3.0 support, DDR4-3200 MHz memory support (64 GB capacities), a 70W TDP and a theoretical compute power of 192 GFLOPs. The other 2 variants feature lower clock speeds of 2.70 GHz and 2.50 GHz.

Coming to the 4 core parts, we have the KX-6740A leading the pack with 4 cores, 4 threads, a clock speed of up to 2.7 GHz, 4 MB of cache, 45W TDP and a theoretical compute output of 86.0 GFLOPs. The other two chips are clocked at 2.6 GHz and 2.2 GHz. The four core parts scale down all the way from 45W and down to 25W on the entry-level models, making them a perfect choice for the ultra-thin notebooks that were displayed by IP3 Tech.

In our previous report, we had covered the essential I/O features for the Zhaoxin features such as PCIe, SATA 3, USB and an integrated GPU that is capable of DX11.1 support. You also get various display interfaces such as DP, HDMI, VGA on the Zhaoxin processors. The GPU is capable of up to 4K Ultra-HD video decoding. That makes it perfect for a small form factor streaming/media box in households. One such PC based on the Zhaoxin KX-6000 CPUs is already available in the Chinese market as reported by us here.

As for performance numbers, Zhaoxin x86 CPUs, while offering a 50% boost in performance per watt, don't necessarily have to come close to current Intel and AMD CPUs. Bejing primarily wants replacement of hardware made by international vendors with its homegrown Zhaoxin CPUs in various government organizations.

Zhaoxin CPU Benchmarks vs Intel's 9th Gen Core i9-9900K:

zhaoxin-8-core-x86-china-cpu_cpuz
zhaoxin-8-core-x86-china-cpu_cinebench-r20
zhaoxin-8-core-x86-china-cpu_3dmark-firestrike-extreme
zhaoxin-8-core-x86-china-cpu_3dmark-firestrike-ultra
zhaoxin-8-core-x86-china-cpu_3dmark-timespy
zhaoxin-8-core-x86-china-cpu_3dmark-time-spy-standard
zhaoxin-8-core-x86-china-cpu_3dmark-port-royal

We have seen some performance benchmarks in gaming and general compute tasks where the Zhaoxin CPUs lack severely behind Intel's 7th Generation CPUs which were introduced almost 3 years ago. Additionally, if you want to see just how good these processors can perform in games, then do watch the following video:

Zhaoxin KX-7000 Next-Gen CPUs - 7nm Process Node, Brand New Architecture, PCIe 4.0 & DDR5 Support

The upcoming KX-7000 processor's GPU is planned to be compatible with DirectX 12 and provide support for PCIe 4.0 and DDR5 RAM by 2021. Not only is Zhaoxin working on 7nm production; at the same time, Zhaoxin is currently in the planning phase for working on a sub-7nm design for both laptop and desktop CPUs. AMD and Intel have also confirmed DDR5 & PCIe 5.0 support for their server platforms in 2021, so they would also have support for the same memory technology on their consumer-based platforms too.

As for its current lineup, Chinese manufacturers and OEMs will definitely eat up large quantities of Zhaoxin x86 CPUs for building a diverse range of PCs and consumer-based products. But from the performance point of view, it looks like Zhaoxin has a lot of catching up to do as its competitors are significantly ahead in terms of efficiency and compute horsepower. The one thing that Zhaoxin can lead in is value as cost of development of a homegrown IP would be way cheaper than outsourcing from a different vendor.

Share this story

Deal of the Day

Comments