When Zhaoxin, a joint venture between Via Technologies and Shanghai Municipal Government, introduced its KaiXian KX-7000 series of x86 processors in late 2023, it implied that the new CPUs will offer tangible performance improvements over its predecessors as they were based on a brand-new microarchitecture. While the new chips are probably faster than their predecessors, they are still years behind AMD and Intel CPUs.
PC Watch this week put Zhaoxin's eight-core KaiXian KX-7000/8 processor (Century Avenue, 8C/8T, 4MB L2, 32MB L3, two DDR4-3200/DDR5-4800 channels, 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes) into a test against AMD's six-core Ryzen 5 5600G (Zen 3, 6C/12T, 3.90 GHz – 4.40 GHz, 3 MB L2, 16 MB L3, two DDR4-3200 channels, 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes, 65W, released in 2021) and Intel's quad-core Core i3-8100 (Coffee Lake, 4C/4T, 3.60 GHz, 6 MB cache, two DDR4-2400 channels, 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes, 65W, released in Q4 2017). While these processors belong to different years and were even positioned differently when released, they operate at the same clock speed, which gives an idea about potential of the latest Zhaoxin microarchitecture (allegedly developed by Centaur Technology).
