AMD and Intel can wet their chest. At least, if we may take earlier examples of China’s production power as an example. It is no secret that if ‘China’, which we use as a synonym for the many branches and aspects of Chinese industry, regulations and stimulation programs for the sake of convenience, gets its teeth into something, it is a matter of time for a sometimes bizarre backlog in a lead or at least a draw is reversed.
A few examples to illustrate this. All electronics came roughly in the seventies of the last century from Japan, the US and a few smaller players. In the meantime, the Chinese factories in Shenzen, among others, can no longer be ignored from the market picture, after the establishment of free trade zones and government stimulation programs. More recently, about ten years ago, cars from China were of the caliber Canta – electric or otherwise – but now they are at least formidable competitors in their own country for Western brands.
This is how the chip industry has fared in various areas. Where once a soc for phones or tablets was woefully weak, nowadays the Kirin socs from HiSilicon are just competitive. Not so long ago, nobody had heard of nand chips from Chinese Yangtze Memory Technologies Co – YMTC for short – but now the company accounts for five percent of world production. We can go on like this for a while, and to come back to the first sentence above: we can probably expect that image for x86 processors as well.
The Chinese Zhaoxin has bought a license in a creative way to make x86 processors. In this review annex background article we look at how things are going at Zhaoxin and what we might expect. Because, spoiler alert, the KX-6000 processor we’re looking at isn’t a speed monster, but in a few years the cards could be very different. We have through Golem.de borrowed a test sample. The German site bought the KX-U6780A with accompanying sign for about 700 euros from Chinese suppliers.
The KX-U6780A on its motherboard: Thanks Golem.de that made the board available.
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