Product Code Database
Zhaoxin ( Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Co., Ltd.; , p=Zhàoxīn ) is a fabless semiconductor company, created in 2013 as a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. The company manufactures x86-compatible desktop and laptop . The term means million core.In China 兆 can mean either short-scale million (1e6) or trillion (1e12). However, for IT-related topics 兆 always means mega/million in mainland China. The processors are created mainly for the Chinese market: the venture is an attempt to reduce the Chinese dependence on foreign technology.
Zhaoxin came to the attention of the North American and European technology press when, in late 2017 and early 2018, it launched the ZX-D processor and revealed plans for future products. Zhaoxin calls the ZX-D architecture "Wudaokou"; this is a complete re-design of the VIA Isaiah. It is also a departure from earlier microarchitectures, such as ZhangJiang, which were a lightly modified version of a VIA Technologies (Centaur) architecture. WuDaoKou was a new and complete SoC design. Changes implemented in the ZX-D included the integration of a northbridge, like in modern x86 designs, as well as the addition of Chinese cryptographic functions. The ZX-D series also had an integrated graphics processing unit (iGPU) based on S3 Graphics technology (previously owned by VIA).
The former ZX naming was dropped around 2018 in favour of the KX ("KaiXian") designation for desktop processors and the KH ("KaisHeng") designation for server processors.
The successor to the KX-6000, the ZX-F or KX-7000 processor series, was initially planned for release in 2021. The KX-7000 chip was reported to be planned for release on a 7 nm process with DDR5 support. An alleged benchmark result for a ZX-F appeared on GeekBench in 2020.
The KX-7000 was finally released in December 2023, two years late. According to test results reported by Tom's Hardware, this processor was twice as fast as the KX-6000 series that came before it. The benchmark score indicated that not only had clock speeds improved substantially, but also instructions-per-clock. In comparison, the KX-7000 was deemed to be on par with similar processors made by AMD or Intel in the mid-to-late 2010s. Zhaoxin was itself reported as saying that the KX-7000 reached the same level of performance as the seventh-generation Intel Core i5-7400 (which was launched in 2017).
| 1.6 Ghz (up to) | Based on the VIA Nano X2 C4350AL | |||||||
Identical to ZX-ANetEase, 真正走向市场化，揭秘中国兆芯X86处理器 [Truly moving towards marketization, revealing the secrets of China's Zhaoxin X86 processor] (in Chinese), 14 Oct 2016.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Archived on 16 Jan 2021. | ||||||||
| SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2Zhaoxin, Kaixian ZX-C Series CPU. Archived from the original on 10 Mar 2018. | Based on the VIA QuadCore-E & Eden X4 | |||||||
| A TDP of 35W | ||||||||
| Manufactured by TSMC | ||||||||
| Manufactured by TSMC | ||||||||
| Lujiazui | KX-6000G (consumer) | 2022 | 16 nm | 4 (up to) | 3.3 GHz (up to) | GPU supports: DX12, OpenCL 1.2, OpenGL 4.6 | With Glenfly GT-10C0 integrated GPU | |
| ZX-F | Century Avenue | KX-7000 (consumer) | 2023 | 7 nm | 8 (up to) | 3.7 GHz (up to) | ||
Outside China, Zhaoxin processors have been used in some NAS appliances, most notably the QNAP TVS-675.QNAP, TVS-675 Hardware Specs.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Archived on 19 Jul 2021.ITPro, Qnap TVS-675 review: Noteworthy, but not impressive, 17 Jan 2022.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Archived on 26 Jan 2022.
The ZX-E / KX-6000 is reported to have a 50% performance increase over the KX-5000, and comparable performance to a 7th generation Intel i5 core processor from 2016 (namely the Core i5-7400). The 8-core ZX-E U6780A was reviewed by Linus Tech Tips in August 2020. The review processor was benchmarked to be slightly slower than a 3rd generation Intel i5 quad-core processor (originally released in 2012–2013) using Cinebench. Gaming performance was noted to be poor, whilst the machine itself was noted to be expensive for its performance by 2020 standards. Tom's Hardware also reviewed the U6780A and reported poor gaming performance in 2020.
The aim for the ZX-F series is for performance parity with the 2018 series Ryzen processors (i.e. the AMD Zen+ microarchitecture, the predecessor to AMD Zen 2).
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