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Zhaoxin Displays x86-Compatible KaiXian KX-6000: 8 Cores, 3 GHz, 16 nm FinFET
Zhaoxin, a joint venture between Via Technologies and the Chinese government, this week for the first time displayed its upcoming x86-compatible CPU, the KaiXian KX-6000. The SoC features eight cores running at 3 GHz and increases performance over its predecessor by at least 50%.
The KaiXian KX-6000 is a successor to the KX-5000 CPU launched earlier this year. Both chips integrate eight-core x86-64 cores with 8 MB of L2 cache, a DirectX 11.1-capable iGPU with an up-to-date display controller, a dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory controller, contemporary I/O interfaces (PCIe, SATA, USB, etc), and so on. The key differences between the KaiXian KX-5000 and the KaiXian KX-6000 are frequencies and manufacturing technology: the former is produced using TSMC's 28 nm fabrication process and runs at up to 2 GHz, whereas the latter is made using TSMC's 16 nm technology and operates at up to 3 GHz. Zhaoxin claims that the Kaixian KX-6000 offers compute performance comparable to that of Intel's 7th Generation Core i5 processor, which is a quad-core non-Hyper-Threaded CPU. Obviously, performance claims like that have to be verified, yet a 50% performance bump over the direct predecessor already seems beefy enough.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 25 2018, @12:22AM (10 children)
If it doesn't have Intel's Management Engine, I don't want it.
At least the IME I know how to disable
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 25 2018, @12:32AM (9 children)
Better the White Devil you know than the Chinese Dragon you don't, huh?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 25 2018, @12:43AM (8 children)
Branding doesn't change the reality, I guess.
Few years down the road it may be the reverse or even a third option gaining preference.
I still hope I'll live enough to see a fully open source CPU, but I don't hold illusions that is a guarantee of any backdoor absence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 25 2018, @02:30AM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 25 2018, @02:54AM (3 children)
And that tails will run on a box with... what CPU? And how much trust you can put in your router?
Not that this problem is new, some guy demonstrated a good while ago you can't blindly trust even your compiler [c2.com] (trying to avoid linking a PDF)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday September 25 2018, @04:11PM (2 children)
We make an FPGA-based NAT/Firewall. Not at the kind of prices you guys would like to pay, but I should really look into a cost-reduced version.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @04:57PM (1 child)
That sounds interesting. How does it work?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 27 2018, @04:15PM
Open every packet at the 10G line rate, check that the headers match exactly what is allowed in, check length and CRCs and a few mandatory fields, potentially replace the headers on the way out the other side. Works mostly at layer 3-4, but it can allow or reject pretty much any packet as long as you program the header in.
It's for professionals with stable flows. Having it dynamically adjust to the hundreds of IPs that your browser wants to connect to for every click you make would be a good deal more annoying. But I know for a fact that nothing that isn't explicitly allowed can get through. There is no "zero day in some sub-library" when you write your own HDL to do bitwise comparisons. Someone would have to hack the controlling computer and add their traffic to the list, or maskerade as legit traffic up to layer n+1 and break the system using higher layers, which would still not allow to expand to new connection or ports until they go to add those new connections to the authorized list.
A Gig-E version would be simpler and considerably cheaper. The main difficulty is to write the control software to allow the right connections in real-time and close them right after. Professional orchestration used by our mostly-staticly-routed customers is very expensive.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday September 25 2018, @05:25AM
I once worked for a Bahamian hedge fund - The Bahamas because there are no taxes there. They had about twenty employees with me as a remote contractor.
The - very very wealthy - owner of the hedge fund got his windows box quite severely pwned, so he bought all his employees a second box purely for the Internet, and has his people mount all their work computers in a lockable rack with Ethernet KVMs.
There is _one_ tax - a usurous 50% import duty under which the native bahamians suffer. I found some joy in this guy having to pay that duty for all those second computers, the KVMs and the rackmount.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 25 2018, @12:39PM (1 child)
RISC-V?
https://riscv.org [riscv.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 25 2018, @01:03PM
Fingers crossed.
But...
Which doesn't sound quite as "full-fledged CPU". And with the current members [riscv.org], it may never will mean a CPU chip - but many, each on designed/customized and fab-ed based on their needs rather than users' needs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford