Zhaoxin


Zhaoxin is a fabless semiconductor company, created in 2013 as a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. The company creates x86 compatible CPUs. The term means million core. The processors are created mainly for the Chinese market: the venture is an attempt to reduce the Chinese dependence on foreign technology.

Architecture

The architecture of the ZX family of processors is a continuation of VIA's Centaur Technology x86-64 Isaiah design. The ZX-A and ZX-B are based on VIA Nano X2 C4350AL. The ZX-B is identical to the ZX-A, except that it is manufactured by Shanghai Huali Microelectronics Corporation . The ZX-C is based on the VIA QuadCore-E & Eden X4. Like current VIA processors, all ZX processors are BGA chips sold pre-soldered onto a motherboard.
Zhaoxin came to the North American & European technology press' attention with the ZX-D processor, and its plan for future products, in late 2017/early 2018. Changes to the ZX-D include the integration of the northbridge like modern x86 designs, as well as additions of Chinese cryptographic functions. The ZX-D series also has integrated graphics processing unit based on S3 Graphics technology.
The former ZX naming was dropped around 2018, for the KX designation for desktop processors, and KH designation for server processors.
The KX-6000 system on a chip was demonstrated to press in September 2018. The chip is reported to have a 50% performance increase over the KX-5000, and comparable performance to a 7th generation Intel i5 core processor from 2016. In June 2019 the KX-6000 was reported to be built on a 16nm TSMC process, and have equivalent performance with the Intel Core i5-7400. This comparison was re-iterated again in 2020. The chip has a DirectX 11.1 compatible iGPU.

Discrete GPU

In 2020 Zhaoxin announced it was planning to release a discrete graphics processing unit.

Summary of architecture

Uses

Zhaoxin processors have mainly been used for Chinese laptops.

Performance

The Zhaoxin ZX-C+ 4701 CPU was reviewed in 2020, and showed significantly worse performance against older Intel and AMD processors. The ZX-D is noted to have roughly the performance of the Intel Silvermont processors. The ZX-E / KX-6000 reportedly has equivalent performance with the Intel Core i5-7400. The aim for the ZX-F series is for performance parity with the 2018 series Ryzen processor.