[Hardware]China catches up and launches its range of CPUs to compete with AMD and Intel

[Dean Ambrose™]

That China is a global economic superpower is not a secret, but that does not mean that they have supremacy in all markets. Proof of this is the hardware industry, where they are still far behind major contenders such as Intel, NVIDIA or AMD. However, the Chinese manufacturer Zhaoxin has just announced the launch of its new generation of CPUs, with x86 architecture and with which it seeks to compete, precisely, with AMD and Intel at least.

No matter how powerful the Chinese economy is, they cannot work miracles, at least not in terms of research and development. Conclusive proof of this is its main processor manufacturer, Zhaoxin, who are literally years behind in the development of their new generation of processors with which they promised the Chinese government that they would compete with Intel and AMD on an equal footing. This new generation of processors has finally arrived, but apparently they still have a long way to go to fulfill their promises...

Zhaoxin KX-7000, the CPUs that China boasts about
As we said, there have been years of delays but Chinese consumer CPUs have finally been launched on the market, based on the licensed x86-64 ISA. According to the manufacturer, these 8-core processors offer twice the performance of the previous generation, with improvements in architecture and up to 4 times more cache memory, although it is true that even with this data in hand they are still far behind in terms of performance. of performance if we compare them with the CPUs that both Intel and AMD have on the market right now.

Of course, although in terms of performance they are still below, they can boast something, and that is that they have equaled Intel and AMD in terms of the use of technologies: these Chinese CPUs have compatibility with DDR5 RAM, PCIe 4.0 and USB4.

It is curious that we always talk about how especially the US and Europe are trying to achieve independence from Asia in terms of semiconductor manufacturing, but they are still the kings in terms of design and in this respect it is China that seeks not to have to depend from external companies (such as Intel, AMD and NVIDIA) to be able to have the latest technology. Proof of all this is that Zhaoxin's KX-7000 are manufactured with 16nm lithography, something that Intel and AMD already left behind in 2014.

Continuing with the specifications of these Chinese CPUs, we have that they have 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, a set of 32 MB of L3 cache and 4 MB of L2 cache and a boost speed of up to 3.7 GHz (remember that they are 16 nm, so (that these figures are quite good taking this into account). These CPUs are also compatible with VT-x, BT-d 2.4, SSE4.2/AVX/AVX2 instructions, of course using the same license that allows them to use the x86-64 architecture which, remember, belongs to Intel and AMD.

The good part is that with these processors, Chinese users will be able to use the same operating systems and programs that are used in the rest of the world, something that can be a great advance taking into account the restrictions they have in the Asian country. We'll see how it all turns out, but this Chinese CPU is something that they certainly haven't been shy about bragging about.

 

https://hardzone.es/noticias/procesadores/china-cpu-zhaoxin-kx7000/