Zhaoxin may hit process parity with Intel and AMD in 2021

It's not a secret that China is spending billions to become more self-sufficient in the technology market. The country is setting up its own NAND and DRAM supply chain, and is also hard at work to make its own processors. As we wrote yesterday, China aims to get rid of all foreign hardware and software in its state PCs over the next couple of years.

Whether we'll see this hardware in large volume outside of China is unknown, but it doesn't really matter as the country's internal market is huge. One of the country's leading processor makers is Zhaoxin, they rolled out a 16nm x86 processor in June. This Chinese firm is a joint-venture between VIA Technologiues and the Shanghai Municipal Government, hence its ability to make x86 processors.

WikiChip takes a look at Zhaoxin's current roadmap and notes the company may achieve process parity with Intel and AMD as early as 2021. The company's current chips achieve frequencies of 3GHz but have poor IPC and power efficiency compared to Intel's and AMD's offerings. If the firm can change this with future generations, it could become a formidable force in the Chinese market.

If Zhaoxin will be able to push the frequency further to as high as 3.5-4 GHz, they will close a good portion of the performance gap, but for their product to be at competitive levels with other x86 chips, in order to extract significant performance uplift from 7 and 5 nm, the company is going to step up its microarchitecture design. Zhaoxin isn’t sharing too many details regarding its new KX-7000 design other than saying it will feature a new CPU microarchitecture and integrate a new GPU capable of DirectX 12. At the SoC level, Zhaoxin plans PCIe Gen 4 and DDR5 memory support.