Chinese X86 CPU on it's way - The Zhaoxin’s KaiXian KX-6780A

[WkdPaul]

4 minutes ago, porina said:

*snip*

WOW !!!

$620 is way too much for what it is!

[porina]

Just now, wkdpaul said:

WOW !!!

$620 is way too much for what it is!

Without knowing how it is being sold, I wouldn't take that as a typical price, just a price a westerner could get it at if they really want one now. I understand it includes mobo, not that it helps much...

[WkdPaul]

1 minute ago, porina said:

Without knowing how it is being sold, I wouldn't take that as a typical price, just a price a westerner could get it at if they really want one now. I understand it includes mobo, not that it helps much...

I get that, even on Asian markets, rarity has a way to bring the price up, but still !

[colonel_mortis]

This backdoor argument is clearly not going anywhere, so please stop it here (@pas008 and @Sauron as the biggest contributors to it, please heed this warning, but it applies to everyone).

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, colonel_mortis said:

This backdoor argument is clearly not going anywhere, so please stop it here (@pas008 and @Sauron as the biggest contributors to it, please heed this warning, but it applies to everyone).

Sorry, saw this after my last post

[Salv8 (sam)]

i would rather use an unpatched day 1 windows xp system destroyed by vinesauce joel running on hardware that JUST BARELY MEETS THE REQUIREMENTS, then use this thing.

[TechyBen]

That's... that's...

 

[wasab]

There is a review of an engineering sample already by a Chinese youtuber

By cpu z, it scores roughly 480 in single core. 

 

Edit: single core is 178. Oops. Chinese are hard to read. Performance is still very much subpar. However IPC seems to be around haswell level at least considering that it is running only on 2.7 ghz. 

 

I5 7400 scores around 398 by this website 

http://valid.x86.fr/8j6q7x

 

They are planning on moving to 7nm soon and they are aiming for performance parity with 2018 ryzen for their next cpu. 

[wasab]

10 hours ago, wkdpaul said:

Regardless, if it's priced accordingly, this could make for affordable low power needs, but I'm not sure I would trust a Chinese company not to insert some spyware in the core of the thing.

Whats ironic is that Chinese made these proccessors to reduce their reliance on foreign technology. 

[Bombastinator]

12 hours ago, wkdpaul said:

The article might not mention it, but it's an evolution of VIA chips.

Yep.  Just watched a hot news about it.  The thing is legal etc..  what I find interesting is how close it is in power and morphology to the new consoles.  It’s slow 8/16.  Just like jaguar2.  One oddity is it’s not LGA apparently it’s BGA.  It will come soldered ONLY, and that board is a cheap cheap thing.  They’re going after the super low end market.  Be interesting to see what it costs.  If they get a board with cpu out the door cheap enough it could eat intel’s celeron market.  Slow 8/16 is better than slow 2/2 or 2/4 even if it isn’t actually any faster en total.  and intel is still selling a few of those.  I wonder how close it might get to a latte panda?

 

Interesting times. 

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, wkdpaul said:

The article might not mention it, but it's an evolution of VIA chips.

VIA hasn't existed in any meaningful way for years.

 

https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/113735-via-zhaoxin-zx-family-x86-processors-roadmap-shared/

Quote

Taiwan's VIA Technologies holds an x86 development license but seems to have been rather quiet for a number of years in this respect. The last thing HEXUS published regarding VIA x86 processors was back in the summer of 2014 when it announced a new version of its 2008 vintage Isaiah x86 compatible processor was about to be released. That was an initiative meant to combat Intel Atom Bay Trail and/or AMD Kabini processors in the low-power entry level netbook/tablet territory.

Quote

According to the presentation that accompanied the slide, and reported by PCHW.de, the VIA/Zhaoxin processors will reach a level of performance competitive to contemporary AMD Ryzen processors by 2019 (probably Zen 2). 

 

Seems kinda wishful thinking? 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13388/zhaoxin-shows-x86-compatible-kaixian-kx6000

 

There's only one sample which shows a rating of 5760 (ZHAOXIN KaiXian KX-U6780A@2.7GHz). That puts it at 1/4 the performance of AMD Ryzen 5 3600. That rating is equal to Intel Core i7-2675QM @ 2.20GHz, yes the laptop CPU from 9 years ago.

[Bombastinator]

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

VIA hasn't existed in any meaningful way for years.

 

https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/113735-via-zhaoxin-zx-family-x86-processors-roadmap-shared/

 

Seems kinda wishful thinking? 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13388/zhaoxin-shows-x86-compatible-kaixian-kx6000

 

There's only one sample which shows a rating of 5760 (ZHAOXIN KaiXian KX-U6780A@2.7GHz). That puts it at 1/4 the performance of AMD Ryzen 5 3600. That rating is equal to Intel Core i7-2675QM @ 2.20GHz, yes the laptop CPU from 9 years ago.

“meaningful way” is a weird one for businesses.  Via was hit hard by a lawsuit that basically prevented them from selling anything.  There are “paper companies” that exist without any employees at all, yet can spring back to life again as soon as the money to run them again appears.
watching the chinese reviewer, The thing is apparently still an engineering sample.  The previous version engineering sample had about half the performance of this thing, and they are expecting another Approximate doubling of performance before it actually gets produced. It’s already fast enough to be an office machine though. The chinese reviewer said 8/8, but hot news said 8/16, so there is apparently a lot of vagueness as to information. Final Production price is going to be a big deal. 

[aisle9]

If it's produced as well as the "X58", "Z77" and "X99" boards they pump out, I'll have to hard pass.

[Bombastinator]

6 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

If it's produced as well as the "X58", "Z77" and "X99" boards they pump out, I'll have to hard pass.

It may be something that never becomes fit for international sale.  It’s still early days though.  For a second gen engineering sample it shows a certain amount of promise.  It doesn’t look like it’s ready for prime time yet.  Even the power supply appears to be a hack afterthought atm.  

[wasab]

3 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

It may be something that never becomes fit for international sale.  

International sales is never the goal. That cpu is meant for domestic market. I would imagine the the biggest customer would be the Chinese government. They really do not want American cpus from American companies when like say waging a cyber war with America or its allies. 

[Soppro]

I wonder whose stolen proprietary technology they've based this on?  This is going to be the start of a race to reach performance parity with Intel and AMD, if they manage to do so within the next couple of years (which, based off of the Chinese' technological efforts in other areas, is quite likely) they are going to be pretty formidable

[JoostinOnline]

Sorry if this has already been asked, but is this legal without paying fees to both Intel and AMD? I thought Intel owned the x86 instruction set, and AMD owned the x64 extension.

[Bombastinator]

25 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

Sorry if this has already been asked, but is this legal without paying fees to both Intel and AMD? I thought Intel owned the x86 instruction set, and AMD owned the x64 extension.

The deal is it’s VIA.  They actually used to be a chip maker.  There was a Russian one too or something that did it by emulation.They had some sort of thing where they lost a lawsuit and had to sit in their hands until a patent ran out but when it did(will?) theyre all good again.  Via always specialized in low end very low power laptop stuff.  Did some of the first ultrabooks though they weren’t called that then.

[Beerzerker]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

The deal is it’s VIA.  They actually used to be a chip maker.  There was a Russian one too or something that did it by emulation.They had some sort of thing where they lost a lawsuit and had to sit in their hands until a patent ran out but when it did(will?) theyre all good again.  Via always specialized in low end very low power laptop stuff.  Did some of the first ultrabooks though they weren’t called that then.

Yes, VIA if it's the same company period, also used to make chipsets and so on.
They were in business over 20 years ago doing that so they, as a company do have a history of chipmaking.

 

HWbot even has a list of CPUs they have made in the past or at least played a part in doing so.

https://hwbot.org/hardware/processors#key=via

 

This shows some of the CPU's associated with VIA:

https://hwbot.org/hardware/processors#key=via_c3

[Dabombinable]

This may be bad compared to what Intel and AMD currently have. However you need to remember that China wants to be capable of manufacturing and designing products such as this due in part to security concerns, and less dependent on other countries for technology.
From that perspective it'd be good.

1 hour ago, JoostinOnline said:

Sorry if this has already been asked, but is this legal without paying fees to both Intel and AMD? I thought Intel owned the x86 instruction set, and AMD owned the x64 extension.

This is China. They really don't care at all (that's why for example the iPhone branded handbags still exist).

[Bombastinator]

15 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

Yes, VIA if it's the same company period, also used to make chipsets and so on.
They were in business over 20 years ago doing that so they, as a company do have a history of chipmaking.

 

HWbot even has a list of CPUs they have made in the past or at least played a part in doing so.

https://hwbot.org/hardware/processors#key=via

 

This shows some of the CPU's associated with VIA:

https://hwbot.org/hardware/processors#key=via_c3

Never had one myself but I had a friend that did.  They were crazy low power for the period. Not a lot of power.  Enough for basic office work though.

[Dabombinable]

2 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Never had one myself but I had a friend that did.  They were crazy low power for the period. Not a lot of power.  Enough for basic office work though.

They were fantastic for office work, and could keep up with or exceed other offerings at the time (love the variety of manufacturers we used to have). Its just the FPU which was a problem, so newer games and work such as CAD were a bit of an issue.

[Beerzerker]

I believe I may have one here, not sure if it's related to VIA but it is a Cyrix chip at least.

[Bombastinator]

27 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

This may be bad compared to what Intel and AMD currently have. However you need to remember that China wants to be capable of manufacturing and designing products such as this due in part to security concerns, and less dependent on other countries for technology.
From that perspective it'd be good.

This is China. They really don't care at all (that's why for example the iPhone branded handbags still exist).

I’m not sure it will even be bad.  Remember they don’t need gaming stuff for security.  They need office stuff.  The engineering sample they got is already good enough to do that, and one commenter said performance was expected to near double before release.  I’m expecting more near a 50% boost on the high end, but that’s enough to beat some lower end chips, and looking at the thing it seems to be designed around absolute minimum cost.   If they can market a board half again as fast for maybe $150, they’ll have something close to competitive.  If they can do it for $99 they’ll have some folks pretty worried.  A Benjamin more for the the rest of the box is very doable, and throw an old gaming card on it and it’s going to beat the $300 “my first gaming rig” thing.  An entire working new all in office PC for $400 would be a major entrant in that market.  Even if it’s not a real good one.

[Dabombinable]

24 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I’m not sure it will even be bad.  Remember they don’t need gaming stuff for security.  They need office stuff.  The engineering sample they got is already good enough to do that, and one commenter said performance was expected to near double before release.  I’m expecting more near a 50% boost on the high end, but that’s enough to beat some lower end chips, and looking at the thing it seems to be designed around absolute minimum cost.   If they can market a board half again as fast for maybe $150, they’ll have something close to competitive.  If they can do it for $99 they’ll have some folks pretty worried.  A Benjamin more for the the rest of the box is very doable, and throw an old gaming card on it and it’s going to beat the $300 “my first gaming rig” thing.  An entire working new all in office PC for $400 would be a major entrant in that market.  Even if it’s not a real good one.

Whichever way you look at it, it'll be better than AMD's FX series, which people still seem to evangelise even though it was bad. And those CPU can still get stuff done (albeit very inefficiently).