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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Not just RISC-V, when it comes to performance the Loongson CPUs (with the LoongArch ISA) are likely the most competitive -- the IPC of Loongson 3A6000 is around that of 10th ~ 12th gen Intel CPUs! And 3A7000 is coming soon.

Zhaoxin is China's answer to "what if we need a drop-in x86 replacement immediately?" It does not represent the frontier of CPU development in the country.

It's also not the only answer, one Chinese company has rights to Zen 1. (which shows just how close AMD was to bankruptcy)

Rather than signaling AMD's bankruptcy, this could be seen as a strong indication of how heavily China is investing in legacy technologies. That's why I wouldn't be so quick to draw conclusions. China’s eagerness in this area doesn’t mean that the investments are efficient. What truly matters here is the ability to build a full ecosystem. They practically wiped Huawei off the global smartphone market simply by banning Google services on their devices.

The license was done in 2016, though. It does not cover any later versions, and even if it did it would be cut off due to export restrictions.

Zhaoxin is China's answer to "what if we need a drop-in x86 replacement immediately?"

Exactly this. China isn't going to be doing HPC on these, or building domestic clouds, or wooing gamers. This is a strategic project so Chinese users can continue to access the x86 ecosystem regardless of 'supply chain issues'.[1][2] And much of that ecosystem can get by with a fraction of the compute of the average gamer, it's just fine that it hits mediocre performance numbers, for now.

[1] And, sure, some national pride. No harm in that. [2] No, "emulators!" is not the only answer.

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