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Chinese CPU maker Zhaoxin has outlined designs for its next-generation KaiXian and KaiSheng processors. China is pressing hard to reduce the country's dependence on US technology. That is why we can now see 7nm processors and PCIe 4.0 and DDR5 technologies by 2021.
KaiXian KX-7000: Marching towards PCIe 4.0 and DDR5
Zhaoxin has two main product lines. KaiXian chips are designed for the consumer market, while KaiSheng processors are designed for the server market. Zhaoxin's KaiXian KX-6000 and KaiSheng KH-30000 series currently use a 16nm process node. However, the Chinese company hopes to achieve parity with Intel and AMD by 2021.
The current KaiXian KX-6000 processors are based on the LuJiaZui microarchitecture and produced with TSMC's 16nm manufacturing process. The chips have a maximum of eight cores and base clocks of up to 3 GHz. However, the upcoming recently announced KX-7000 chips will apparently employ a new processor microarchitecture, which Zhaoxin has yet to reveal.
TSMC is reportedly in charge of producing the KX-7000 chips for Zhaoxin with the 7nm process node. Going from 16nm to 7nm is a pretty big leap and should allow Zhaoxin to squeeze more megahertz into the KX-7000 chips. If the new microarchitecture is legal, Zhaoxin should be able to bridge the performance gap between it and Intel or AMD.
The 7nm KX-7000 parts are expected to come with a new iGPU (Integrated Graphics Processing Unit) that is DirectX 12 compliant as well as the latest PCIe 4.0 interface and DDR5 RAM.
Similar to the existing Zhaoxin KH-30000 consumer offerings, the Chinese company also unveiled the KH-40000 processor with a 16nm node. They have up to eight cores and base clocks up to 2.7 GHz.
Visit our guide on the best processors on the market
Zhaoxin promises to quadruple the number of cores from eight to 32 cores in the future for this series. This would put the KH-40000 on the same ground as AMD's Threadrippers, at least from a central perspective. It remains to be seen how well it will perform.
As we can see, the trade war between the United States and China is forcing that country to develop its own processors, something that may come against the United States. The KX-6000 processors already match the performance of i5, so in the future the gap will be increasingly narrowed. For the United States, this is one less market where they can sell their processors, one of the most important in the world. We will keep you informed.
Zhaoxin kaixian kx
Zhaoxin presented this week its new KaiXian KX-6000 CPU, a SoC based on the x86 architecture and with a total of 8 cores.
