Zhaoxin, a three way partnership between By way of Applied sciences and Shanghai Municipal Authorities, has launched its Kaixian KX-7000 sequence of x86 CPUs. Primarily based on the corporate’s Century Avenue microarchitecture, the processor options as much as eight general-purpose x86 cores working at 3.70 GHz, whereas using a chiplet design underneath the hood. Zhaoxin expects the brand new CPUs for use for consumer and embedded PCs in 2024.
In line with particulars printed by Zhaoxin, the corporate’s newest Century Avenue microarchitecture appears to be like to be considerably extra superior than the corporate’s earlier x86 microarchitecture. This new design contains enhancements within the CPU core front-end design in addition to the out-of-order execution engines and back-end execution models. The CPU cores themselves are backed by 4MB of L2 cache, 32 MB of L3 cache, and eventually a 128-bit reminiscence subsubsystem supporting as much as two channels of DDR5-4800/DDR4-3200. Moreover, the brand new CPUs pack as much as eight cores, able to reaching a most clockspeed of three.70 GHz.
Consequently, the brand new CPUs are stated to double computational efficiency in comparison with their predecessors, KaixianKX-6000 launched in 2018.
On the graphics facet of issues, Zhaoxin’s Kaixian KX-7000 CPUs additionally pack the corporate’s new built-in GPU design, which is reported to be DirectX 12/OpenGL 4.6/OpenCL 1.2-capable and presents four-times the efficiency of its predecessor. Although given the reasonably low iGPU efficiency of the DirectX 11.1-generation KX-6000, even a 4x enchancment would make for a reasonably modest iGPU in 2024. Principly, the iGPU is there to drive a display screen and supply media encode/decode performance, with the KX-7000 iGPU able to decoding and encode H.265/H.264 video at as much as 4K, and might drive DisplayPort, HDMI, and D-Sub/VGA outputs.
One other attention-grabbing element about Zhaoxin’s KX-7000 processors is that the corporate says they’re utilizing a chiplet structure, which resembles that of AMD Ryzen’s processors. Particularly, Zhaoxin is inserting their CPU cores and I/O capabilities in to totally different items of silicon – although it is unclear into what number of totally different chiplets altogether.
On the I/O facet of issues, the brand new CPUs present 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, two USB4 roots, 4 USB 3.2 Gen2 roots, two USB 2.0 root, and three SATA III ports. And, given the goal market, it presents acceleration for the Chinese language commonplace SM2 and SM3 cryptography specs.
In the mean time, Zhaxin shouldn’t be disclosing the place it plans to supply its Zhaoxin’s KX-7000 processors, nor on what node(s) they will be utilizing. Although given Zhaoxin’s earlier elements the and the restricted, regional marketplace for the chips, it’s unlikely that they are intending to make use of a modern fabrication course of.
Maybe the ultimate notable element about Zhaoxin’s Kaixian KX-7000 CPUs is that they’re set to return in each BGA and LGA packages, one thing that doesn’t typically occur to Chinese language CPUs. An LGA form-factor will allow an ecosystem of interchangeable and upgradeable chips, which is one thing that we’ve not seen from Chinese language processors for consumer PCs within the current years.
Zhaoxin says that main Chinese language machine producers, together with Lenovo, Tongfang, Unigroup, Ascend, Lianhe Donghai, and others, have developed new desktop techniques primarily based on the KX-7000 processors. These techniques – which will probably be obtainable subsequent yr – will run working techniques like Tongxin, Kylin, and Zhongke Fonde.
