Official x86 Zhaoxin Processor Support Is Coming With Linux 5.3

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Official x86 Zhaoxin Processor Support Is Coming With Linux 5.3

Zhaoxin is the company producing Chinese x86 CPUs created by a joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai government. The current Zhaoxin ZX CPUs are based on VIA's Isiah design and making use of VIA's x86 license. With the Linux 5.3 kernel will be better support for these Chinese desktop x86 CPUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zhaoxin-Linux-5.3-Improvements

[uid313]

These are intended for the Chinese market to reduce reliance on foreign technology. The x86 architecture is a legacy architecture that is rather inefficient and suffers from poor instructions per cycle (IPC). They really ought to bet on ARMv8 or RISC-V instead.

[gnufreex]

Legacy can last another 40 years. So China needs to have x86 cpus even if they are making ARM and RISC-V. There is demand and need for x86 in every country, including China.

[Sonadow]

VIA is so lagging behind in x86 and x64 development. Hopefully the injection of cash from China will result in VIA processors and motherboard chipsets showing up on the retail market with the likes of AMD and Intel as a third option.

An affordable four or six core low-power VIA x64 processor will be great for a headless mini PC processing and broadcasting my PS4 gameplay captures on Facebook.

[Guest]

Legacy can last another 40 years. So China needs to have x86 cpus even if they are making ARM and RISC-V. There is demand and need for x86 in every country, including China.

I understand your point, but wouldn't it be cheaper to import whatever existing designs? available?

[Ropid]

There's a typo in the article in "VIA's Isiah design", it should be "Isaiah".

[numacross]

These are intended for the Chinese market to reduce reliance on foreign technology. The x86 architecture is a legacy architecture that is rather inefficient and suffers from poor instructions per cycle (IPC). They really ought to bet on ARMv8 or RISC-V instead.

Don't worry, they have an entire high-end ARMv8 stack ready and working on 7nm already

[Weasel]

The x86 architecture is a legacy architecture that is rather inefficient and suffers from poor instructions per cycle (IPC). They really ought to bet on ARMv8 or RISC-V instead.

I think you have it backwards. And honestly nobody cares about IPC if you need 100 instructions to do the same thing as one instruction in x86.

[the_scx]

These CPUs are not developed by VIA or Centaur, but by Zhaoxin.

https://www.jfdaily.com/news/detail?id=158407

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1155069.shtml

According to a report by local news site jfdaily.com, the capacity of Zhaoxin's latest general-purpose lineup has increased by 50 percent compared with the previous generation, with Zhaoxin's KX-6000 series now reaching the equivalent of Intel's mainstream platform i5-7400.

I am a little bit skeptical about these results (I believe in pure int performance, but I am not sure about performance of SIMD extensions), but at the same time I believe that there is a huge improvement in performance compared to Isaiah II from VIA.

More info about Zhaoxin CPUs:

https://www.forum-3dcenter.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=572719&page=15

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/zhaoxin/microarchitectures/lujiazui

[discordian]

Don't worry, they have an entire high-end ARMv8 stack ready and working on 7nm already

Well, the trading dispute has proven that you can't build your own ARM CPUs, unless you have an active license than can be revoked at any time.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/22/18635326/huawei-arm-chip-designs-business-suspension