Zhaoxin KaiXian x86 CPU Tested | Hacker News Reader

Zhaoxin KaiXian x86 CPU Tested

tomshardware.com

84 pointsluu59 comments

This article mentions Windows 10 China Government Edition:

Windows 10 China Government Edition that is designed to meet the country's security and privacy standards (Microsoft basically stripped out all of its spyware for this special version of Windows for the Chinese government, and we don't have access to a copy).

Did anyone here heard more about it?

Apparently it's an 'Enterprise' edition available only for the Chinese government - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...

It's funny that the Chinese, who have created a vast network of online and offline spywares, gets to have a Windows stripped of all spyware! Shows how much Microsofts cares about us ordinary users.

> It's funny that the Chinese, who have created a vast network of online and offline spywares, gets to have a Windows stripped of all spyware! Shows how much Microsofts cares about us ordinary users.

Your point is correct consumer-wise, but saying that only the Chinese Government benefits from this is misleading. It is certainly possible to disable every telemetry - if you use the enterprise version.

(By the way, Windows 10 Home China is also like Windiws 10 Home - except that telemetry is stored domestically in China rather than transmitted to US.)

> but saying that only the Chinese Government benefits from this is misleading.

No, the Chinese version has all the telemetry code removed. There's nothing to turn off, unlike in the Enterprise edition.

So Microsoft still has full access to telemetry, they just have to generate the reports inside their China divisions?

Not for the Chinese government. Their Windows version has no telemetry code at all.

> Windiws 10 Home

I had to do a search to see if that was a knockoff or just your typo!

(It's a typo)

That relevant quote is misleading to say the least and possibly sensational: the real reason such a modified version exists is to replace the cryptographic standards from US FIPS to Chinese-approved ones. Of course, they (like every company and government lucky enough to have access to Enterprise versions) can turn off that telemetry (there is no detail if it was indeed removed, but I wouldn't be shocked if it instead collects telemetry to be sent off to Chinese government-controlled servers).

And we're talking about whole country which already censors and blocks internet traffic so the telemetry being sent to the US wouldn't be a real problem anyway except for saving internal bandwidth / firewall capacity.

But Microsoft's servers are not on GFW's blocklist.

What's the equivalent level of performance in terms of AMD/Intel CPUs? Sandy Bridge or thereabouts? Because for the past few years, PCs have basically been "fast enough" for most things, super-inefficient monstrosities like Electron excluded. In fact my "daily driver" is probably slower than this Chinese CPU.

Incidentally, there is an interesting and active market in Chinese motherboards with X79/X99 chipsets, which are from that era, along with used Xeons and such.

Obviously those who place performance above all else will not be buying these.

Seems to be roughly in line with https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/129945/... in some benchmarks as per the article

Some Reddit searching suggests a geekbench score comparable with a FX-8100

It's also worth saying that these comparisons can be overly favourable as (from the architectural design perspective) you can effectively get some performance for free from the roughly 4 process doublings in between this and the Bulldozer.

Only one process doubling. This is 16nm and Bulldozer was 32nm.

Its obviously still quite a bit behind architecturally, though.

Density has gone from about 7.5 on GF to 28 on TSMC if I read correctly.

Ah, so around 1.9 doublings. Seems like I was wrong :)

I wonder if Windows ARM will be so mature that by the time these groups get x86 parity with Intel, it won't matter outside of specialized high-performance applications like gaming because we'll be migrating to ARM by then anyway.

Other than Apple silicon, is there any other competitive ARM desktop processor? If not, and if, as the article states, the Chinese government is funding a 100% domestic silicon stack by 2022, then Zhaoxin might be competitive sooner rather than later.

>is there any other competitive ARM desktop processor?

Depends. There are ARM Server Processor, there are also ARM High Performance CPU-Core Design ready to be fabbed. So the question here isn't if there is one, it is who has the right incentive to fab one.

> any other competitive ARM desktop processor

Perhaps better to say any other competitive ARM machine, since the actual CPUs are generally fine (not amazing, mind, but good enough) but crippled by unfortunate firmware/motherboards/etc.

I’m thinking Microsoft’s SQ2 or other Qualcomm chips might end up in a laptop first (Surface Pro X doesn’t count as a proper laptop), then desktop soon after. (Complete speculation though)

I'm really afraid of Linux getting left behind in the dust. It will be interesting to see if we will get RISC-V devices that can stay competitive with Apple's proprietary ARM based chips.

But Linux has been working perfectly on ARM for many years (decades at this point?).

We just need general purpose computing to stay alive (and it's not actually being killed with the M1 yet).

RISC-V doesn't make much of a difference here. You can still build highly locked-down proprietary systems using it.

In fact, Apple occupies a fairly tiny fraction of ARM that's not shipping Linux out of the box - most ARM chips are running Android or some other embedded Linux spin. Inferior hacked-up Linux installs on locked-down hardware, yes, but just running Linux on ARM isn't anything like a difficulty.

Running a non-ancient Linux on ARM is what's difficult. Especially when connecting stuff to the internet, it's completely unacceptable to have to rely on some 3.x or 4.x kernel that the vendor patched to death to make it run, then abandoned to move on to the next SKU.

> You can still build highly locked-down proprietary systems using it

M1 is oh-so close to that

Linux doesn't really work with ARM boards. It's more of a clusterfuck. You can run mainline Linux on any PC. When it comes to mobile ARM, there is no unified device management system (UEFI/BIOS). Devicetree is a joke and no one uses it, and every device take a Linux kernel and patches the hell out of it in totally non-upstreamable ways.

PostmarketOS has made great strides in fixing this issue, but Linux doesn't just work on ARM. You have to port each distro you want to use to each and every device. With a PC, you can buy any Lenovo, Dell, HP, etc off the self and you will always be able to boot to a console; usually graphics mode too. That's not the same case at all with ARM boards.

I wrote more about this a few years back:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/android-fragmentation/

> It will be interesting to see if we will get RISC-V devices that can stay competitive with Apple's proprietary ARM based chips.

Just to really make this obvious in case of any misunderstanding:

RISC-V is an open ISA. You are free to use the instruction set. A microarchitecture implementing the RISC-V ISA can be just as proprietary as the developers please.

(This is from April 2020 -> could use (2020) in the title)

Too soon!

Would be interested to know what design software they use for these chips.

In general, I'm very curious what a modern EDA flow looks like for an Intel or AMD - of those two AMD are apparently much better at automating their designs. I'm guessing not much of the HDL is ever actually touched by a human any more (i.e. generated from a specification by some in house program).

Tools like nMigen do exist where you write a Python program that generates the Verilog for you. You can also run formal verification on it. I’m sure Intel and AMD have their own in house software systems.

Is this of any relevance, given the first stabs of Apple and AWS at pivoting respectively desktop (m1) and server (Graviton) markets toward ARM?

Interesting. Makes me want to get my hands on one. Feasible for a hobbyist or no? Tried searching on eBay but didn't get many results.

Atleast someone is checking Intel's monopoly. thank you china

Surely AMD or non-x86 is in a far better position to check Intel's position? Given that they're shipping something today that's a match for current-gen Intel...

Meh. My opinion is that they (China) should abandon this approach.

This was planned back in the early 2010s, before the rise of Trump and MAGA.

The reality and situation on the ground has changed. Now, the powers that be of America, is pursuing persecution and containment of all Chinese advancements in technology.

China should abandon Intel x86 and all software from Microsoft. In fact, they should ban it and make it illegal to use.

They should instead focus on Huawei’s new Harmony OS and a new RISC-V processor instruction set architecture.

They must also abandon ARM, since that’s under western control, and nVidia is trying to acquire it, which means it’ll also be under American control.

America played its card. They are willing to use sanctions for everything. The only way for China to counter, is to not play America’s game. And instead, to make their own game.

The benefit to this is multipronged. It allows domestic manufacturers to build expertise in software and hardware systems for operating systems, databases, application software, and hardware components.

But first, they must crack the photolithography barrier, and build a domestic competitor to ASML.

For Americans, you don’t have to worry about using Chinese technology, since you’re not the target market for this. You can’t anyways, since Huawei has been banned in America. So you don’t have to worry about China mysteriously spying on your Facebook posts (as if you’re really that important to them anyways).

Seems yet another return of Cyrix, this time under a communist flag.

Centaur.

no cares US's patent troll crp , We are waiting for chinese chip to be sold in outside china

If it's build on the VIA intellectual property, VIA bought Cyrix and have access to some of the licensing around x86. It will be interesting to see if they try to push these in the US and if they're legally allowed to. (They probably are).

Unless they were somehow subsidized by the Chinese government I don't understand what market there would be for a slow, undocumented, probably buggy, power-hungry chip like this

Do not underestimate the power of the word 'cheap', especially in the enterprise where some division buys the hardware for the other divisions and is only reviewed on cost.

They are able to match the performance of i5 , woooow

On Page 1, there's a chart comparing low resolution gaming to a Core i5, and the Zhaoxin chips are running DoTA at just 20% the framerate of the Core i5 integrated chips.

On Page 2, the Zhaoxin KX-U6780A is compared to a Core i3 and Ryzen 3, and underperforms both of them.

On the Page 3 gaming benchmarks, it often performs around AMD A10-9700[0].

The one place is does seem reasonably competitive with a 7th gen Core i5-7400 is in the 7-zip compression benchmark on Page 4, where the eight cores are put to use against a four core Intel chip that doesn't have hyperthreading enabled.

[0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/7th-gen-a10-9700-apu

[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97147/i...

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