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Zhaoxin is ready to enter the domestic (Chinese) consumer market with its homegrown x86 CPUs, the KaiXian KX-6000 series. The CPUs will be used by Chinese ODM, IP3 Technology, in more than 50 products which include desktop PCs, notebook PCs, all-in-ones, Mini PCs & even industrial machines.
The Zhaoxin x86 CPU powered product portfolio was announced by IP3 Technology (Yingzhong Technologies) at an event hosted by the ODM. As mentioned above, there are a range of PC devices that will make use of Zhaoxin's KX-6000 series processors which are the only chips besides AMD & Intel to make use of an x86 architecture. While several products were showcased, IP3 Technology didn't unveil their respective specifications and prices yet.
[...] As for performance numbers, Zhaoxin x86 CPUs, while offering a 50% boost in performance per watt, don't necessarily have to come close to current Intel and AMD CPUs. Beijing primarily wants replacement of hardware made by international vendors with its homegrown Zhaoxin CPUs in various government organizations.
Previously: Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-6000: A Chinese x86 SoC
Zhaoxin x86 CPUs Available to PC Makers in China
China's Homegrown Zhaoxin KaiXian CPU Used in a Mini-PC
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday May 13 2020, @01:50AM (28 children)
If you're trying to build reasonably high-end CPUs to achieve some self-sufficiency, why do you need an x86 (presumably -64) architecture? The only reason you'd need this is to maintain compatibility with software that only runs on it, namely Microsoft Windows. So the Chinese aren't getting much self-sufficiency here at all: they're still beholden to Microsoft for their OS.
If they used Linux, perhaps a home-grown distro, they wouldn't have this limitation. Linux can run on virtually any architecture, so they could have skipped the creaky old x86 architecture and gone straight to ARM64, which everyone else uses these days when they're not worried about Windows compatibility. Even Windows looks like it'll be running on ARM before long.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @02:03AM (4 children)
If they want to, eventually, be able to export it, maybe it is.
Also, they had the lonsoon (mips), but for some reason felt it necessary to emulate x86 with it too. Maybe ms windows is that entrenched in China.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by petecox on Wednesday May 13 2020, @02:46AM (3 children)
The year of the affordable arm64 workstation* has been promised real soon now for some time.
Bearing in mind that Chinese collaboration with Via commenced 7 years ago when ARM was a smartphone niche and something of an industry joke was Microsoft's Windows RT.
* As previously discussed with takyon, I'm optimistic the next generation RPi-killers single board computers utilizing Amlogic/Rockchip/Allwinner will be equipped with 8GB ram within a year or 3.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday May 13 2020, @03:36AM (2 children)
You used the word "desktop", not "workstation", which implies something even stronger. Some ARM chips are being made to use more power, like the Snapdragon 8cx [soylentnews.org] or Apple's upcoming 12-cores [soylentnews.org].
x86 (along with 8 GB) does have a presence in SBCs:
Single Board Computer With AMD Ryzen Embedded [soylentnews.org]
ODYSSEY - X86J4105800 Most expandable Win10 Mini PC (Linux and Arduino Core) with 8GB RAM [seeedstudio.com]
A ~6 Watt or even ~15 Watt (can be TDP-down to 10 Watt) x86 APU should be no problem for an SBC with active cooling. Pricing can be much higher than RPi but that is true for some of the ARM boards.
Back to ARM, Rockchip is the one I'll be following. It seems to be landing in a lot [pine64.org] of designs [notebookcheck.net], and the upcoming RK3588 [wikipedia.org] should be particularly powerful.
I expect Raspberry Pi 5 to launch with 2/4/8 GB RAM because 1 GB has been dropped, they have been doing product lines like the Compute Modules in threes, and the rush for 4 GB models proved there would be plenty of demand for a more expensive (but still under $100) SKU. A $75 computer w/ 8 GB RAM is an impulse buy.
On the CPU side, RPi's options could be limited if they stay on the 28nm node. They could move to 4x Cortex-A75. More cores seems unlikely unless they use big.LITTLE (something Intel might [pcgamesn.com] be embracing [notebookcheck.net]) which has not been used on any RPi model. If they want to be cheeky, they could do 4x Cortex-A75 and 1x Cortex-A55.
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by petecox on Wednesday May 13 2020, @04:12AM
the OP seemed to be implying China should have focussed on ARM64 as a Core i(3,5,7,9) replacement, i.e. your high performance office beast.
Specs on a rpi4/rockpro64 aren't quite ready to replace my ageing laptop and NUC but for my modest home desktop needs but surely the next iteration such as the RK3588 will.
So yes, deliberately I'm distinguishing a Rockchip fanless nettop VESA mounted on the back of an hdmi monitor from a monster Wintel killer! :) Concerning the latter, a $US1000+ price range for an ARM64 MS Surface/Macbook doesn't tickle my fancy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @07:11PM
too bad arm is such a PITA in regards to upstream uboot support etc (for non arm nerds).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday May 13 2020, @02:34AM (2 children)
Most important factor is, those processors facilitate Chinese government standard encryption algorithms in hardware, so they provide a strict national sovereignty in that field.
Those algorithms are obligatory in China for government and military operations.
All American vassal states except Russia could only envy for that level of digital sovereignty.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @02:50AM
I'm glad someone is here to stick up for the little guy with a great human rights record. If you don't stick up for a defenseless Communist dictatorship, who will?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday May 13 2020, @06:37AM
Yup. Given the arbitrary dictates of the USG, particularly under the current administration, the more you can do to make yourself fully independent of anything the US can randomly cut you off from with no notice, the better. This is about national sovereignty, not business.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday May 13 2020, @02:52AM (1 child)
First, the ARM-servers were tried and, so far, failed again and again, so the Chinese still need the "server independence" (including running Linux).
Second, even if the Chinese started with x86, it doesn't mean they are going ahead only with x86.
Third, on the question "Why they started with x86?"
Zhaoxin [wikipedia.org]
VIA Technologies [wikipedia.org]
Result: VIA acquired the right and the knowledge to design x86.
--
Now, as for the question of "why they aren't doing ARMs"... well, Huawei do produce ARM64 under license [theverge.com] and so does Phytium [wikichip.org] (the supplier for Xiaomi [wikipedia.org]).
And Huawei has plans for ARM64 servers [theregister.co.uk]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday May 13 2020, @05:35AM
Shoulda gone with Alpha [stackexchange.com]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @03:07AM (2 children)
But they have a home-grown Linux, Deepin. So to keep easy in-stepping with advances in Linuxland globally, they now have an OS that is likely "adjusted" to the "requirements" (comrade!) AND now have a home-grown chip to run it on. I wonder how long it is before a deluge of really cheap x86 machines floods the world, no Intel, no Windows, no Google, etc. Of course you can expect other things baked-in...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @04:39PM (1 child)
Or maybe not. If they could get away with it, maybe. But before you get all Huawei-paranoid and buying into Qualcomm's buying off the US Government, remember that the same rule as Huawei applies... They might not only intentionally not bake in the spyware on export models, they might cut back on any legitimate QI phoning home as well. Why? Because if it is proved more trustworthy than US equipment, they still win. Spying would be a bonus, sure. But taking the high road might be the more winning strategy for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @07:23PM
If china made open hardware with all FOSS support, i would buy it over proprietary US tech. fuck Qualcom et al.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday May 13 2020, @03:19AM (1 child)
Red Flag Linux [wikipedia.org] is a thing. And while I have been angrily ranting about China lately, I fully support the efforts of all nations to become technologically self-sufficient. Now if only we could have our own Old Glory computer arch and operating system free of rootless cosmopolitans and other fifth-columnists, as well as a government free of those, we'd have no such things as the sufferings of industrial espionage and foreigner-instigated race wars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @03:15PM
I never understood why China didn't embrace Linux and open-source more. They both are commie plots to undermine America.
Also, since their so good at math, why don't they fix the Equation Editor in LibreOffice? It's a joke compared to Word 2000.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday May 13 2020, @03:27AM
they need wintel so they can play their MMO games
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 13 2020, @03:49AM
x86 is exciting and "hot". Just look at AMD and Intel launches.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday May 13 2020, @04:26AM (3 children)
They used to have some systems with (MIPS) Loongson [loongson.cn] processors. See also loongson at wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. The computers using these looked rather promising and were quite reasonable. Some vendors outside China even had them for a while. However, they started to go full-on proprietary, losing their foreign market which was based on Free and Open Source Software operating systems. Since then there's not been anything visible in English, that's been many years now.
The world needs to leave x86 behind. Windoze politics is holding us back on that though.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday May 13 2020, @06:43AM (2 children)
It wasn't due to them being proprietary, it was because they used the MIPS ISA, which has always been the half-forgotten leftover in terms of software support. How many mainstream Linux/BSD distros, and accompanying mass of software, still target MIPS? For FreeBSD at least it's tier 3, which means "you're on your own". For Linux you're got more or less OpenWRT and that's it apart from a few marginal distros. If you want software support you need to either go with x86 or Arm, and x86 has more than Arm for business users.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday May 13 2020, @02:51PM
Chicken and egg. There's no mainstream distros targeting MIPS because there's no non-router machines out there using MIPS. PCs with MIPS CPUs simply don't exist. However, if someone wanted to make such a PC, getting a Linux distro to build for that arch would not be difficult. The source code is all there for any distro you want, so the CPU maker themselves could do it with a small team pretty quickly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @07:47PM
Debian has a MIPS port that covers both big and little endianness.
(Score: 3, Touché) by RamiK on Wednesday May 13 2020, @04:38AM
FTFY
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Wednesday May 13 2020, @06:09AM
Because time-to-market? They can re-use the same fab. tools & processes for x86. Also its not easy to switch overnight all the x86 software (Os, apps, drivers, etc), baby steps.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday May 13 2020, @06:35AM
The value is the x86, not the performance. If it wasn't for the x86-ness we'd all be running Arm-based laptops, desktops, and so on.
And that's why the fact that the Zhaoxin CPUs are slower than Intel ones doesn't matter. They're not building them for server farms or high-end gaming PCs, they're building them for office PCs and laptops for which anything from the last 10-15 years will do just fine.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @08:50AM
The bigger picture. When a country exports all of its manufacturing know-how with the notion that imaginary property laws are the future, it eventually discovers that all of that training in manufacturing eventually means that country doesn't need your designers, and can do the whole thing themselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday May 13 2020, @10:57AM
Do you know how rampant "software piracy" is over there? Big trouble in little China doesn't even come close to describe it. MS isn't really making bank over there.
Beyond that you are correct. They, or their consumers, want to run the software they are used to -- preferably without paying anything for it. But yes one would somehow hope that one day we can somehow toss the yoke of the x86/64 and Windows on the garbage pile of history but I guess that day still has not come. I'm starting to wonder if it ever will.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ilsa on Wednesday May 13 2020, @02:04PM (1 child)
You can't make major shifts all in one go. They have to be done in baby steps. Look at every OS that has tried to compete with Windows. Apple was the only one that has succeeded, and even then they almost went under if not for a bailout from Microsoft. (Microsoft needed to do this or they would have been a 100% monopoly in desktop computers instead of the 90% they were)
Who would buy a processor that runs exactly nothing, with no ecosystem around it? Transmeta learned that one the hard way.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Wednesday May 13 2020, @08:08PM
I'm pretty sure ARM has a huge ecosystem of software it runs. From IOS devices to Android to the desktop on my Raspberry Pi.