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.
chasil · 32m ago
"Zhaoxin did not specify what process node they’re using. Techpowerup and Wccftech suggests it uses an unspecified 16nm node."
mappu · 24m ago
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.
jkampman · 1h ago
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.
luyu_wu · 1h ago
Absolutely 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 · 1h ago
It 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.
jkampman · 50m ago
Tangential but thank you for always providing such detailed benchmarks and insights. Your work is a treasure!
hawflakes · 4h ago
Minor nit. Compound pinyin words shouldn’t use StudlyCaps so it should be “Lujiazui”
gitroom · 1h ago
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.
marcodiego · 3h ago
Hmmm.. it maybe free from IME! Maybe the FSF want a word with them.
haunter · 3h ago
No IME but whatever unknown chinese rootkit? Out of the frying pan, into the fire
marcodiego · 2h ago
I can reason about an "unknown chinese rootkit" as much as about an "unknown US rootkit".
daniel_iversen · 5h ago
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?
No comments yet
Merrill · 5h ago
How would use of the Kylin OS instead of Windows 11 affect the user's perception of performance?
IncreasePosts · 5h ago
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?
Havoc · 4h ago
Yeah. 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
jandrese · 3h ago
Seems like it depends on the price point. These chips might be slow by modern standards, but if they're cheap enough then it doesn't really matter for a lot of the potential applications. I'm typing this post on a chip that is roughly in that performance bracket (an i5-3750k) that only rarely feels like the bottleneck. And this is my gaming machine.
mrandish · 2h ago
I'm running a well-optimized 2014 Haswell I5-4590 system with a Radeon 7800 XT in my virtual pinball cabinet. It's handling real-time 3D at 1440p 120fps at medium-high settings and VPX is pretty CPU heavy. My system is probably only a generation or two ahead of the one described (although it's true that Haswell was one of those occasional Intel generations that became legendary for outperforming and generally aging very well).
p1necone · 1h ago
That's very lopsided in favor of the GPU - if VPX is more CPU intensive that the average video game you could probably swap the 7800 xt for something much cheaper and get the same performance.
mrandish · 1h ago
Yes, I agree. I was actually planning to retire that mobo and CPU after the GFX upgrade but that damn Haswell is so good, I didn't need to. The previous GFX card (a 1080) was the bottleneck getting 120fps reliably. I really didn't expect the i5-4590 to keep up with 120fps at low latency but got surprised.
remlov · 1h ago
Haswell/Broadwell with embedded 128MB of eDRAM Level 4 cache are some extremely awesome hidden gems.
999900000999 · 2h ago
Plus the vast majority of work computers don’t need to be particularly fast. Add a lightweight Linux distro, and that’s more than enough for paperwork.
markus_zhang · 3h ago
Yeah it is pretty common. Governments invest in key area corporations to provide fund, tax breaks, regulatory aid and a bunch of other benefits, and sometimes sell its chunk of shares in a few years.
One early example is Chongqing government with Huang Qifan as mayor back in the 2010s.
jenny91 · 5h ago
Yes, it's very common in China.
fspeech · 5h ago
Do 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 · 5h ago
The 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 · 3h ago
They work at companies or universities, and there is a "market" to look to for the pay scale.
dghlsakjg · 2h ago
This initiative seems to be a private company propped up by government funds rather than direct government employment. Think Lockheed Martin not DARPA.
snvzz · 2h ago
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.
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.
The breakaway ARM China or SpacemiT or Loongson could drop in an x86_64 frontend and might get better results.
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.
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)!
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.
No comments yet
Basically an attempt to bootstrap an industry brute force style
One early example is Chongqing government with Huang Qifan as mayor back in the 2010s.
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.