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For nearly a decade, the CPU race in desktops and laptops has been a ii-way fight between AMD and Intel. It's like shooting fish in a barrel to forget there used to be a 3rd competitor in the race: VIA. While it never enjoyed much mainstream market place presence, information technology once offered extremely low-power x86 hardware for embedded systems, small form cistron builds, or unproblematic desktop work. The company arguably had a hazard to compete against Intel's Cantlet when the VIA Isaiah debuted, but OEMs never actually adopted the chip. Now, nonetheless, there's news that VIA's new subsidiary and joint venture, Zhaoxin, is planning to launch its own line of x86-64 CPUs for the Chinese market.

The beginning iteration of the new CPU isn't going to exit Intel or AMD quaking in their boots. The KX-5000 is a quad-core CPU with a 2GHz clock speed, with support for DDR4 and PCI Express 3.0. USB 3.ane (Gen 1 and ii), USB 2.0, and SATA 3. The epitome below shows CPU progression from 2022 through to at least 2022 based on the product dates given:

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There's not much detail on the underlying compages, merely nosotros tin can make some predictions based on VIA's ain public product families, the KX-5000's capabilities, and the roadmap for these parts going forrad.

These new chips seem to exist extensions of the same Isaiah architecture VIA has previously deployed, but with pregnant improvements. The specifics of those improvements, either betwixt Isaiah (40nm, VIA) and the ZX-C (28nm, Zhaoxin) or between older and newer variants of the ZX-C aren't known; the but listed advances mention support for "SM3/SM4 cryptographic algorithm."

The move to 28nm and the use of an SoC architecture suggests the continued development of the aforementioned IP VIA leveraged for its ain cores nearly a decade ago. The primeval Zhaoxin systems used VIA's VX11PH chipsets, merely more recent CPUs in the ZP-C product line (which predates the KX-5000) use its ain chipset, the ZX-100S. This newer chipset appears to exist a fairly small point update, not an enormous overhaul.

The epitome above suggests Zhaoxin took a similar path to Intel and AMD, first deploying a standalone CPU on its own procedure node in 2022, followed by expanding to dual-dice (eight-core) support in 2022. In 2022, Zhaoxin brought chipset I/O and PCI Express lanes on-die, while apparently maintaining the aforementioned system architecture simply in a unmarried package. Intel and AMD both took a gradual approach to device integration, moving functionality on-die in stages and over time. The ZX-5000 family adds support for multiple capabilities previous fries didn't offer, in a significant feature improvement for the company's products. It as well looks every bit if Zhaoxin has moved to a unified die for its products, since the quad and eight-core CPU options aren't marketed as "Dual Die" anymore.

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Criterion results imply the ZX-5000 SoCs are faster than the ZX-C fries they supplant, though it's not clear where the gains come from or what overhauls Zhaoxin may perform in the future. Next year'south KX-6000 will run across a speed jump upwardly to 3GHz and a new process node. It wouldn't exist surprising if this was a major architectural revamp as well. Switching from 28nm planar to 16nm FinFET technology gives Zhaoxin a reason to revisit the underlying CPU architecture and make any changes required to sustain higher clocks or improve IPC. And it'southward probable a cardinal component in China's overall push button to make itself self-sufficient in semiconductor engineering.