Why it matters: Zhaoxin, a fabless chip maker based in Shanghai, has produced a homegrown x86 CPU line that'due south patently ready for the DIY scene. The Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-6000 serial of processors were originally shown off in 2022, but since then we had heard little about them. Now it seems that the KX-U6780A volition come to market this quarter, as listed on Chinese retail site Taobao with a March release engagement.

For the uninitiated, Zhaoxin is a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. Zhaoxin's electric current CPU designs have origins in Centaur Engineering, a visitor acquired by VIA in 1999. The VIA Nano Isaiah core design, built by Centaur, would serve equally the architecture for Zhaoxin'due south first CPUs.

The Isaiah pattern was Centaur's outset superscalar CPU capable of out-of-guild execution. This is what seemed to pave the way for Zhaoxin'southward in-firm designed LuJiaZui cores, as they too are built around a superscalar, out of club architecture. LuJiaZui seems to be an iterative migration from the Wudaokou architecture, but too supports modern instruction ready extensions such as AVX and SSE4.2, which is an important development for China and its domestic CPU goals.

The KaiXian KX-U6880A appears to exist the series flagship, with the slightly lower clocked KX-U6780A slotting in only beneath it. All KX-6000 serial chips are based on the LuJiaZui architecture, boasting 8 cores and eight threads. The unabridged KX-6000 series are congenital on TSMC's 16nm FinFET procedure node, with frequencies ranging from 2.7 GHz to three.0 GHz and built with a 35mm x 35mm BGA parcel.

Recently, a Chinese tech YouTube aqueduct got a concord of a KX-U6780A and C1888 mini-ITX motherboard combination. Looking specifically at the KX-U6780A, the chip has a 70W TDP, a dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory controller, DirectX xi support, modern I/O interfaces such as SATA, USB, and PCIe 3.0, with 8MB of L2 enshroud. Notably, the chip has no L3 cache.

The C1888 motherboard, which seems to be built by Shenzhen Cjoyin Electronics, is reportedly an engineering sample. The lath comes with two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots supporting DDR4-3200 RAM. There's besides mSATA and SATA ports for storage, and supposedly at that place will be future support for NVMe and mainstream CPU coolers as final revisions are made for the concluding product.

According to Zhaoxin, the performance of the KX-6000 serial should be like to an Intel Core i5-7400, a 4C/4T Kaby Lake chip that launched in early 2022. The Chinese enthusiasts did run the CPU through some benchmarks similar Cinebench R20, where the KX-U6780A scored 845. That puts the KX-U6780A somewhere around an Intel Pentium G4600 or AMD FX-6300.

The Chinese YouTube aqueduct likewise paired the KX-U6780A and C1888 motherboard with an RTX 2060 Super for a handful of gaming benchmarks, where the hardware managed to push 60 FPS in the games tested. However, the games didn't announced to be particularly CPU intensive, and we don't know exactly how the tests were performed.

While Zhaoxin'south KX-6000 series remain way behind the likes of Intel and AMD's current crop of processors, Zhaoxin has aggressive plans to bridge that gap by 2022. The upcoming KX-7000 series are gear up to be built on one of TSMC'southward 7nm nodes and will bring support for DDR5, PCIe 4.0, likewise as boasting a refined iGPU. Zhaoxin reportedly has its optics set towards sub-7nm designs every bit well.

China'southward home brewing of semiconductors seems to exist advancing speedily, peculiarly as the country is attempting to wean itself off of American semiconductors.