
Zhaoxin KX-6000 CPUs Purportedly Match Intel's Core I5-7400 in Performance - rbanffy
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-zhaoxin-kx-6000-core-i5-7400,39694.html
======
iforgotpassword
It's history repeating. After ww2, Japanese electronics was the cheap stuff
like we perceive Chinese products as today. During the 70s Japan caught up and
got ready to overtake in certain fields. Surprise. Than this repeated with
south Korea. Now China is getting ready.

And every time it's the same pattern. First it's "hah look they make these
cheap inferior copies" then quality improves and gets on par so it changes to
"well they just copy our products and then sell them for cheaper because labor
costs are much lower" and then when they finally start to innovate and excel
everybody is super surprised cause it was just stupid Japanese/Korean/Chinese
copying our technology without really understanding it so how could they
possibly make something on their own?

 _(yes, obviously not everybody, but this is pretty much a simplified
/exaggerated version of the overall sentiment)_

~~~
Gibbon1
That's totally true. The Chinese are also starting to aggressively go into
distribution and finance. And unlike the Japanese and Koreans they aren't
politically under the thumb of the US. They are big enough they can ignore the
Washington Consensus.

That's where the big freakout is coming from.

~~~
FartyMcFarter
The real freakout is that their government combines ruthless authoritarianism
with suffocating surveillance technology, and they haven't even gotten started
yet...

~~~
rbanffy
For me the scariest part is the demonstration that capitalism works better
under an authoritarian regime.

~~~
achenatx
authoritarian regimes can start off very efficiently, but eventually collapse
because of corruption. The corruption results in very inefficient allocation
of capital. The chinese govt is very corrupt with an estimated million civil
servants taking bribes.

If china is lucky xi jinping, who is now president for life, will be a great
ruler for his whole life. If china is typical, he will make some bad decisions
and the system will collapse.

~~~
ardy42
> authoritarian regimes can start off very efficiently, but eventually
> collapse because of corruption. The corruption results in very inefficient
> allocation of capital. The chinese govt is very corrupt with an estimated
> million civil servants taking bribes.

The PRC definitely has a lot more low-level corruption, but the US has enough
high-level corruption to be concerning.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The PRC has lots of high level corruption as well. Much of the Chinese economy
is already owned by a few powerful red families.

~~~
mitfahrener
Ah no. Chinese economy is much bigger than something a few families can own.

~~~
mhh__
Much and most are not synonymous in this context

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bertjk
Hold on now.. Neither the article nor the article it links to have any details
on what it means by matching performance. No benchmarks are given or even
mentioned, only many words written about how it has a 3ghz clock speed and how
3ghz is an "international mainstream standard".. Given the nontechnical nature
of the publication, I would not be surprised if the clock speed was the only
thing they were measuring by.

~~~
seotut2
There are some benchmarks available on Geekbench with some of their current
CPUs:
[https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/12754288?baseli...](https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/12754288?baseline=12740853)

Single core performance / IPC seems more comparable with Intel's Atom line,
but that's still very impressive.

------
billions
Intel's monopoly handicapped Moore's law for a decade until competition
reemerged.

~~~
derefr
Moore's law is about transistor density, and Intel is not responsible for its
leveling-off; that'd be the order-of-magnitude increase in engineering
challenge due to quantum effects at lower scales. There was plenty of
competition to shrink die size (especially on mobile, a market Intel isn't
even competing in) but everybody who got down to 10nm has just been stuck in
the same molasses.

Intel _is_ responsible for sitting on its laurels re: highly-multicore
processors and total TDP, don't get me wrong. But neither of those have
anything to do with Moore's law. Ryzen CPUs are as big as Texas; we're scaling
"out" rather than "down" now.

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jandrese
Anybody know if these chips require anything like Intel's IME or AMD's PSP?
Could this be the answer Libreboot has been looking for?

~~~
mfatica
I highly doubt one of the most authoritarian governments is going to produce a
chip the libre community would use

~~~
butteroverflow
I live under authoritarian government. The basic idea everybody here adheres
to goes something like this: as long as you're going to be spied upon (and you
are), it might as well be a country on the other side of the globe. We're in
much greater danger from the shadowy types who are supposed to be protecting
us from foreign actors (heh), than from the NSA. That's one reason why we
proxy everything through US servers. So who knows…

~~~
jgalt212
I buy that logic so long as you:

1\. never travel overseas.

2\. the authoritarian govt doesn't run low on cash and start selling all this
data to the highest bidder. very similar to fears about the Soviet nuclear
stockpile after the fall of the Soviet Union.

------
wmf
And you won't be able to buy it outside China.

~~~
rasz
as I posted under
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20238207](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20238207)
you wont be able to buy them full stop. They are samples (if they ever existed
at all). Afaik not a single device shipped with those CPUs ever. They are the
product of: "National IC Investment Fund (called the "Big Fund") will mainly
focus on three key sectors in the coming years, including memory, SiC/GaN
compound semiconductor, and IC design with its application in IoT, 5G, AI,
smart vehicles, etc."

~$75 billion by 2017

[https://press.trendforce.com/node/view/3025.html](https://press.trendforce.com/node/view/3025.html)
direct non-repayable cash money funds up for grabs to anyone showing something
on paper.

~~~
dis-sys
> direct non-repayable cash money funds up for grabs to anyone showing
> something on paper

If it is indeed that useless and wasteful, why the US is forcing China to stop
such state funded initiatives? It is so far one of the key issues blocking the
China-US trade talks.

Using your logic, US should just relax and sit back to watch China waste all
its limited money on such highly corrupted projects and to have itself
destroyed.

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ars
I have a feeling this is the 80/20 rule. It's fast now, because it doesn't
actually do everything, it's a sample.

Once they actually implement that final 20%, they'll realize it's harder than
it looks, i.e. it's slower than before.

Things like cache coherence, thread isolation, hard stuff like that.

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Havoc
If they keep up that pace they'll soon catch up fully

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peter_d_sherman
Question... does Zhaoxin allow the public to audit their x86 microcode
updates; that is, is/are their microcode/microcode update format(s):

a) Documented

b) Publicly Available/Transparent -- no NDA or paywall

c) Auditable

?

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exabrial
Match as in performance, not IP, in case anyone else read that headline
incorrectly. Very interesting, I wonder if it'll be available stateside

~~~
dang
OK, we've added performance to the title above.

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swamp40
My take on the headline was that Intel's I5 was copied exactly. Not the case.
"Performance on par with..."

~~~
writepub
Mine as well, I believe it was intentionally click baitey.

However, it looks like they developed the tech in house, which is a testament
to China's advances in R&D. I've long worked at semiconductor companies where
employees wrote off Chinese tech as incompetent, but their ignorance and
hubris was the thing China was relying on to move up the value chain
organically.

