Zhaoxin's ZX-F/KX-7000/KH-40000 and beyond

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DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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Today they have access to the 16nm FinFET chip TSMC in Nanjing China. They did not want to wait for free capacities of 7nm in 2021.



That's got to hurt. TSMC bumped them. Kinda wondering why they didn't try for something like GF 12nm or SMIC 14nm instead? Maybe the cost of adhering to someone else's design rules was simply too high?
 

Nereus77

Member
Dec 30, 2016
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Competition is great and all, but VIA are waayyyy behind AMD and Intel. I hope they catch up, but it would literally take Jim Keller himself to do so. He's currently at Intel though.
 
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Kosusko

Member
Nov 10, 2019
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Centaur x86 microarchitecture: "CNS" for x86/x86-64 Zhaoxin KX-7000 (VIA) processors

• 2H20
• 16nm TSMC
• 195mm2 SoC "CHA"
• 8 core CPU with 16MB L3 cache
• 4xALU, 3xAGU, 3xFPU
• NCORE 34.4mm2 (AI Coprocessor from dedicated 16MB SRAM)
• SIMD up to AVX-512
• 4 channels of PC3200 DDR4 DIMM
• 44 PCI Express 3.0 lanes
• 2-socket systems (optional)
• reference platform running at 2.5GHz today





No images or links posted without personal commentary.


esquared
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Kosusko

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Nov 10, 2019
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Centaur CNS x86 core


Your posts must include your own personal content, they cannot consist of content from others, be it links, quotes, or images.

AT Moderator ElFenix
 
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Kosusko

Member
Nov 10, 2019
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The core µarch and design choices sound quite nice. At least from a technological point of view Centaur seems to be back.

Zhaoxin unveils next-generation general-purpose processor design specifications
  • Kaisheng 16nm KH-40000 up to 64 cores, DDR4, PCIe 3.0 (officially launched in 2021)
  • Kaixian 7nm KX-7000 SoC with DX12 IGPU
source: http://www.zhaoxin.com/InCenterContent.aspx?id=282

Apparently the first customer is Zhaoxin as join-venture company with VIA Technologies.
 

Kosusko

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Nov 10, 2019
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Zhaoxin CPUs roadmap

http://m.3dcenter.org/dateien/abbildungen/Zhaoxin-CPU-Roadmap-2016-2021.png

source: http://www.3dcenter.org/news/hardware-und-nachrichten-links-des-1617-dezember-2019

We can say this is "CPU part" Centaur roadmap.
It's over 24 years of x86 experience. Those people there are extremely wise. Glenn Henry and others can easily be compared to Jim Keller and others...
The client has changed and has different requirements.
They wants to do servers and machine learning, AI so the achitecture adapts to it and here you are CNS, SHA SoC alias KH-40000.
 
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IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
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Competition is great and all, but VIA are waayyyy behind AMD and Intel. I hope they catch up, but it would literally take Jim Keller himself to do so. He's currently at Intel though.

They don't have to be at the top. You can be a success being a hot dog vendor and don't have to create a competitor to McDonalds.

It's exactly what the original team did. They said rather than trying to take over the world like AMD/Intel, they aimed at much-ignored low power and low cost segment. Since they were very good at that it was profitable for them.

I think they can do the same, even if they are not the fastest CPU. Since its also x86, it'll be easier to migrate to as well.
 
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Hitman928

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Apr 15, 2012
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Gamer's Nexus tested the Zhaoxin C+4701 which is their 2016 CPU. It isn't pretty. Maybe someone can get their hands on one of the newer CPUs to see how they actually perform.

 
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lightmanek

Senior member
Feb 19, 2017
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Gamer's Nexus tested the Zhaoxin C+4701 which is their 2016 CPU. It isn't pretty. Maybe someone can get their hands on one of the newer CPUs to see how they actually perform.


I wish he would ran more CPU tests and talk less about political situation, but otherwise good video and definitely worth watching.
I'm surprised someone like Steve never used VIA or Centaur or Cyrix processors in his life. I had and used all of them, learnt their strong and weak points and have fond memories of running them. Same goes for S3 graphics chips, which I owned various models, with S3 Trio64+, Savage3 and Savage4 being stand-outs in my memory. In Steve's review he only brushed S3 history and made it sound like they dissipated during 3D graphics boom, but S3 had few very good ideas, like hardware texture compression and many patents worth paying money for.

Anyway, I would like to see more tests like that and hopefully Steve or someone else can grab newer Zhaoxin CPU models and put them through proper benchmark session with integer and FPU workloads, including split for SSE and AVX workloads.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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It's hard to acquire Zhaoxin CPUs in the United States. They should be easier to get than Huawei hardware, though.
 

Kosusko

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Nov 10, 2019
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A few retail boards beside the known board from Cjoyin:


attachment.php
attachment.php


attachment.php
attachment.php


source: https://www.forum-3dcenter.org/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=12268260&postcount=492

_______________________________________


Gamer's Nexus tested the Zhaoxin C+4701 which is their 2016 CPU. It isn't pretty. Maybe someone can get their hands on one of the newer CPUs to see how they actually perform.



But it also knows the 2.0GHz VIA / Zhaoxin QuadCore to help good things.

 
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Kosusko

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47:42 - 55:15



P.S. here is drivers to Zhaoxin/S3G C-960 iGPU

And here is drivers to Zhaoxin/S3G C-860 iGPU

And here is latest S3G drivers
 
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DrMrLordX

Lifer
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@Kosuko

That's 2 hours. What's the timestamp for the relevant part?

edit: looks like around 52:00.
 

Richie Rich

Senior member
Jul 28, 2019
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Nice video. Especially at 59:15
"The problem with x86 is that it's such a garbage" :D
"It's inefficient but broadly used and backwards compatible"
"Yeah, but it's such a garbage" :D
 

Thunder 57

Platinum Member
Aug 19, 2007
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Nice video. Especially at 59:15
"The problem with x86 is that it's such a garbage" :D
"It's inefficient but broadly used and backwards compatible"
"Yeah, but it's such a garbage" :D

Nice how you put the smilys after each time he says x86 is garbage. Are you trying to prove yourself right because someone said that? Do you not like competition? Because we've seen what happens one one company has a massive advantage over another. It's never ended well.

If something is "garbage", it doesn't stick around for 40+ years. It gets replaced by something that isn't garbage, what many of your posts seem to be.
 
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DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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Hmm. Seems kinda slow. It's nowhere near the i5-7400 except in . . . 7-zip. Keep trying, VIA/Zhaoxin.
 

Kosusko

Member
Nov 10, 2019
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Hmm. Seems kinda slow. It's nowhere near the i5-7400 except in . . . 7-zip. Keep trying, VIA/Zhaoxin.
Yes, because 16nm KX-6000 Series (ZX-E) is mostly about integration into SoC.
28nm KX-5000 Series (ZX-D) is mostly about integration into APU.
ZX-C C4000 Series was only remake VIA QuadCore C4650 respectively VIA Eden X4 4000 Series from 2015/2016.
This is still small core - VIA Isaiah II - CNR wirh roots into the VIA Isaiah alias VIA Nano 2008 (CNA).


The brand new architecture from scratch is 16nm Centaur CNS microarchitecture (Centaur CHA SoC) alias ZHAOXIN KH-40000 Series (ZX-F) at the beginning 2021.
And this is BIG core.
 
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DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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Yes, because 16nm KX-6000 Series (ZX-E) is mostly about integration into SoC.

Okay. But it uses a ton of power. Perf/W is really bad. And Zhaoxin kept saying, it's close to an i5-7400, which clearly isn't true.