Question Zhaoxin rolls out DeepSeek support to all processors — Watershed moment or blip? Oops or wow?

[AnitaPeterson]

According to Tom's Hardware, the CPUs made by Zhaoxin can now run the DeepSeek AI LLM by themselves, no GPU needed.

When we discuss these chips here, we usually wonder how good they are at gaming. But this is an unexpected diversification, which should give Nvidia frissons.
The Chinese don't need consumer CPUs on par with Zen4, if they can bypass trade restrictions and technology embargoes to obtain similar (or better) results to the West when it comes to hardware and software.

Chinese CPU maker Zhaoxin rolls out DeepSeek support to all processors — entire product lineup now runs DeepSeek LLMs natively

Zhaoxin claims its 64-core server CPUs can run DeepSeek's 671B model without the help of GPUs.

www.tomshardware.com

This could be a watershed moment.

 

[gdansk]

You can also run it on a $30 ebay special Xeon. If speed nor efficiency matters why not use even older and cheaper?

 

[Jan Olšan]

It's a major :crickets: moment, frankly.

Are the processors still not competitive with state of the art: yes
Does Deepseek run on them anyway because you probably just have to toss a lot of RAM on a potato CPU: yes
(alternative CPUs are generally good at the "toss a big capacity on the processor" part, even if the performance of the memory subsystem can be lacking)

Basically they are trying to ride the buzz and plant their "still here" PR into the mainstream on the freshly famous name. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but you must not overread what it means.