China is a country known for having no respect for intellectual property and copying absolutely everything possible. Even if it is a little complicated to surprise us, it must be said that the Asian giant has succeeded again. It seems that bravea Chinese processor manufacturer, has achieved copy an AMD processor with Zen hearts.
For years, China has been investing huge amounts of money to gain technological independence from the United States. This has degenerated into a trade war between the two countries with sanctions, tariffs and bans of all kinds.
For example, China cannot buy cutting-edge chipmaking machines from ASML to use US patents. This means that the Chinese do not have access to the latest manufacturing processes, at least in principle. They have managed to use advanced nodes, repurpose machines, and use all sorts of tricks.
Have the Chinese managed to copy AMD processors?
First of all, it is worth knowing that Sugon signed an agreement with AMD years ago to market processors based on the Zen architecture. These chips used silicon manufactured by GlobalFoundries in the United States. The special feature is that they supported SM3 and SM4 encryption, exclusive to the Chinese market.
Thanks to this “trick” and the fact that the CPUs were assembled in China, Sugon can formally claim that they are designed and manufactured in the country. This is essentially a fairly basic semantic trick that masks the truth.
Recently, the Hygon C86-7490 in China. This processor is not new, it seems to have been used for testing purposes, since it appears with handling marks.
This Sugon processor uses a SP5 EncapsulationAMD’s latest offering for data center chips. It is unclear whether the cores in this processor are based on the Zen architecture original. This is the one used in the Ryzen 1000 launched in 2006.
The interesting thing about Zen architecture is that it does not offer support for DDR5 RAM memory. AMD introduced support for this standard in the Zen 5 architecture.
We are giving this information because the Hygon C86-7490 is mounted on the Sugon Hygon C86-4G systems. These systems have 2- and 4-way configurations for RAM with a total of 48 DDR5 DIMM sockets. By the way, each of the lanes offers support for 12 DIMM slots per CPU, which coincides with the 12 memory channels of the AMD EPYC SP5 package.
This leaves us with a big doubt and this is how Sugon managed to ensure DDR5 support in an architecture that supports DDR4. It is possible that they used an IOD chip (the one that manages inputs and outputs) that supports the DDR5 memory controller.
In fact, the sale of advanced processors to China is prohibited by the United States. The problem is that nothing is said about IODs, which allows advanced solutions to be sent to China without any problems. It seems that Sugon took advantage of this loophole to create an unprecedented hybrid.
Uniting the latest generation IODs with the original Zen cores must not have been particularly simple. For starters, the current IODs are based on the 6nm process, while the Zen cores are based on the 14nm process. The voltages of the IODs and the Zen cores are vastly different.
Achieving the combination of the two must have been a huge engineering challenge. We don’t know anything about the performance, since this is not a commercial solution.
