China is Making its own x86 CPUs | Zhaoxin KX-6000-Series

China is finally making its own x86 chips, and they are already on sale.

The last time a Chinese company made an x86 CPU, they were an affiliate manufacturer of AMD's -then brand new- EPYC line of CPUs. They wanted to get the Zen-based CPUs out on time, so they enlisted the help of THAIC (Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co,) to help manufacture the chips and make the deadline.

Today, Zhaoxin -an entirely different company based in Shanghai- got a licence to produce chips based on the x86 architecture from Intel, and wants to compete in the CPU market.

This image borrowed from Zhaoxin's website.

The Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-6000 series processors are not only ready to ship, but they were already on the market. The KaiXian KX-U6780A is on sale on the Chinese retail site Taobao.

the KX-U6780A has 8 cores, 8 threads, and 8MB of L2 Cache. It even supports Directx 11 and modern PCI standards like PCIe 3. and things like SSE4.2. This chip also has a Dual-channel Memory controller, as all CPUs should these days.

There are some downsides though. Despite clocking in at 2.7GHz, the CPU has no L3 cache, and no support for DX 12 (At least not officially.)

The roadmap for Zhaoxin's technology down the road.

Right now, there is only one board manufacturer for the KX line of chips, and that comes to us from Shenzhen-based company Cjoyin Electronics. They make a board called the C1888 for the KX,

The CPU is closest to the 2012's AMD FX line of processors in terms of performance, clocking in at around a 1300 score on Cinabench R20.