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Love 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.

This 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.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.

I 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.

Minor nit. Compound pinyin words shouldn’t use StudlyCaps so it should be “Lujiazui”

Hmmm.. it maybe free from IME! Maybe the FSF want a word with them.

This 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?

Been 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.

How would use of the Kylin OS instead of Windows 11 affect the user's perception of performance?

What'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?

Note 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.

it 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.