China wants to become more technologically independent from the West. So you already develop your own graphics cards, memory and processors there. It was not until mid-2019 that a CPU from the Chinese manufacturer Zhaoxin broke the 3 GHz mark. Supposedly, it was already at the level of an Intel Core i5 7400. However, there have been no reliable benchmarks so far.
Gamer's Nexus has now pursued this intensively and initially clarifies the question: How is it really about China's own x86 CPUs?
For this purpose, the hardware experts have a complete PC with one Zhaoxin Kaixian ZX-C + C4701 send. Here are the key data of the calculator:
- 4 cores without virtual core doubling
- 2.0 GHz
- x86 and x64
- 28 nm
- 18 watts
For info:
Zhaoxin is a joint venture between the Shanghai government and VIA Technologies. Therefore, the company has a license for x86 processors.
What are the benchmarks like?
For the monkey head render benchmark from Blender 2.79 (picture below) the ZX-C + C4701 takes almost 307 minutes. AMD's Athlon 200GE with 2C / 4T, 3.2 GHz base clock and 35 Watt TDP calculates the monkey heads in 116 minutes and Intel's Core i5 2500K (4C / 4T, 3.3 / 3.7 GHz, 95 Watt TDP) from 2011 takes around 94 minutes.
The distance to the western competition is huge in Blender. (Image source: Youtube / Gamers Nexus)
In Civilization VI Zhaoxin's quad-core takes an average of 183.9 seconds to calculate a lap. Here too, AMD's entry-level CPU Athlon 200GE (72.6 seconds) and Intel's aged quad-core (54.6 seconds) are clearly ahead – not to mention the latest processors.
It would be interesting to compare the 3 GHz CPU Zhaoxin KX-U6880A, which is manufactured using the more modern 16 nm process and offers eight cores.
more on the subject
Chinese x86 CPU »Hygon«: benchmarks against AMD Ryzen
How strong would the latest generation be?
The Geekbench database has minor pointers on how to rank the performance of a KX-6000 processor. There are two ZX-C + C4701 and one KX-U6780A (8C / 8T, 2.7 GHz).
The comparison shows that the eight-core unit has around 62 percent higher single-core performance (366 against 226 points) and, based on the higher number of cores, around 70 percent (344 percent absolute) higher performance per core in multi-core operation ( 2,167 versus 629 points).
The distance to AMDs and Intel's current processors should still be huge.
Zhaoxin plans for the future to significantly reduce the gap to western competition. The first processors are to be manufactured using the 7 nm process as early as 2021.
