Huawei is a whole different beast though. They have a everything from the chip design up, and by now also an operating system that has arguably both a better frontend framework and a better kernel that the Linux alternatives. When we talk about Chinese AI chips being slow we specifically talk about classic desktop chips.
Also! For normal desktop work a 2011 intel chip is plenty fast. A lot of critical systems like train booking systems are keyboard focused ancient UI systems, and they seem fine.
They have JV with ARM ( ARM China ) and AMD ( Zen 1 ), IMG ( PowerVR and MIPS ) Along with investment on RISC-V. Alibaba and Huawei are all investing into RISC-V as well. Considering they dont sell CPU I wont be surprised if China one day give away RISC-V CPU design for free.
Surprisingly ARM China issue is still somewhat unresolved and ARM now has a separate subsidiary inside China.
Already done: https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/10/20/alibaba-open-source-... https://github.com/XUANTIE-RV
This one is mode than twice as fast.
I'm not sure why local governments would get involved although in general China has had a problem with too much investment and not enough places for it to go. It's not impossible that there are essentially local sovereign wealth funds.
Basically an attempt to bootstrap an industry brute force style
I eventually upgraded, went off to university, etc. When I finally came home, I found out my mom apparently "borrowed" it, figured out how to install Ubuntu, and has been using it ever since for grading papers and what not.
No idea how much longer it will remain in use, but aside from the awful screen, ironically, honestly, I think the browser and the seemingly ever increasing resource requirements of the web will eventually be the only thing that finally causes an upgrade.
It wouldn't surprise me if these processors are more than fine for municipal workers.
One early example is Chongqing government with Huang Qifan as mayor back in the 2010s.
Windows 11 is dog slow on corporate hardware. Linux, even with bloated KDE or Gnome, is much faster.
Zhaoxin is China's answer to "what if we need a drop-in x86 replacement immediately?" It does not represent the frontier of CPU development in the country.
Exactly this. China isn't going to be doing HPC on these, or building domestic clouds, or wooing gamers. This is a strategic project so Chinese users can continue to access the x86 ecosystem regardless of 'supply chain issues'.[1][2] And much of that ecosystem can get by with a fraction of the compute of the average gamer, it's just fine that it hits mediocre performance numbers, for now.
[1] And, sure, some national pride. No harm in that. [2] No, "emulators!" is not the only answer.
The behavior of the memory controller is wild to see in this day and age. You really don't want to see latency that high in general, but especially not for a client processor. I'd really like to see how it behaves with a reasonably powerful GPU in a CPU-bound gaming workload relative to the competition (to simulate what one of these might see in an internet café setting, for instance).
Power efficiency also seems truly dismal according to PCWatch: https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/column/hothot/1626253.ht... . In Cinebench MT, it's consuming about the same power as a Ryzen 5 5600G while delivering about 1/3 the performance, and the idle power is much higher than the Core i3-8100/R5 5600G to boot. That's not a huge issue for desktops, but it would not make a good foundation for a mobile system.
Overall an improvement versus past Zhaoxin efforts but people shouldn't kid themselves about the quality of the overall package here. There is a long way to go.
Interestingly, the chip is rated to run at DDR4-3200 or DDR5, so it's strange C&C got half that.
The power issues are likely from by modern standards pre-historical clocking behavior (single P-state to my understanding)!
I remoted into the system for testing (Cheese/George had it), and he said it took 3-4 cold reboots for it to come up, and suspected memory wasn't training correctly. So I did all the testing without ever rebooting the system, because it might not come back up if I tried.
The breakaway ARM China or SpacemiT or Loongson could drop in an x86_64 frontend and might get better results.
For x86, supporting multiple companies would be more difficult, as they would need a license for the ISA (which Zhaoxin inherits from Via).
Risc-V is arguably risky, so they have their hands on everything at the same time so they're sure they have a winner.
Markets don't matter. They want to develop the technology and have the talent to achieve it, fast.
vessenes•9mo ago
There is to my mind a sort of race to get up to "fast enough to host H100 competitor AI hardware" with non-US IP that makes sense to engage in. In those terms, it looks like they're maybe 2 revs away -- I'm not sure what process node the KX7000 is on, but there's some architectural work to finish up. That said, this is interesting. I assume the chips will continue to improve from Zhaoxin, unless they lose their core team.
chasil•9mo ago
vessenes•9mo ago
I think if I were in charge I’d probably do a final architecture spin at 16, and then shrink that one to 7 or 5 if I could get it.
undefuser•9mo ago