Zhaoxin was created in 2013 and is based in Shanghai. It is a fabless semiconductor company which means it does not own any factories, rather contracts out its productions. The Company, in June this year, released its CPU built on a 16nm process node, based on LuJiaZui microarchitecture.
Even though Zhaoxin has a long way to go when it comes to building CPUs for PCs and Laptops, the Company has just announced its ambitious goal of coming to par with Intel and AMD.
It takes us back to 2016 when Huawei announced its goal of becoming the number one smartphone manufacturer globally. The Smartphone Giant is closer to its goal than ever. Hence, the thought of having another dominating semiconductor manufacturer other than AMD and Intel is not too farfetched.
Zhaoxin is currently in the process of designing out its next generation of SOCs for the KaiXian and KaiSheng series. The KaiSheng Series processors are being designed for server and data center applications.
The Company’s processors are based on the Lujiazui architecture and the current KaiXian KX-6000 processors offer up to eight cores clocked at 3 GHz. On the other hand, KX-7000 chips (yet to be released) will use new architecture built on the 7nm manufacturing process. These new processors will feature iGPUs that will be designed to be compatible with DirectX 12. They will also provide support for PCIe 4.0 and DDR5 RAM.
Apart from this, the Company is also planning to work on a sub-7nm design for both laptop and desktop CPUs. Both, AMD and Intel, have also announced DDR5 & PCIe 5.0 support for their server platforms in 2021.
As far as Zhaoxin KaiSheng Series Server CPUs are concerned, they will be based on a 16 nm process node but will offer quadruple the cores/threads compared to the current KH-3000 series processors.
Let’s see how things work for the emerging semiconductor manufacturer.
China announce they will kick out American processors out of their Govt offices, so Zhaoxin is the only choice, and since Govt. backing Zhaoxin, they will eventually boost the production of x86 architecture.
but anyways, its good for the world.