
Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs - Sami_Lehtinen
http://en.zhaoxin.com/solution.aspx?id=3
======
sanxiyn
This is VIA Technologies. Details here: [http://www.tomshardware.com/news/via-
chinese-x86-soc-2019,36...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/via-
chinese-x86-soc-2019,36209.html)

~~~
djsumdog
Ah, the old VIA chips, which VIA built from the tech they bought from Cyrix.
If you're interested in the history of Cyrix and some of the older x86
compatible chips, here's a great video on it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWGAdoMz1c0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWGAdoMz1c0)

Also these Zhaonix's are just 32-bit right? I didn't seen anything on the site
about supporting x86_64.

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aidenn0
VIA's CPUs were from their purchase of Centaur Technology, not fro Cyrix,
right? (IIRC there is a HNer that worked at Centuar for a while, perhaps they
can expand).

~~~
rzzzt
The C3 does seem to be from Centaur:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C3)

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0xcde4c3db
The page says "Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the
ground up within China", but other sources suggest that their cores are
derived from Centaur microarchitecture. Anyone know what the truth is on this?

~~~
sanxiyn
VIA bought Centaur, so you can argue that, tenuously. VIA is a Taiwanese
company. Some people insist that being Taiwanese is being Chinese.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
Even granting the considerable stretch that the VIA acquisition somehow
renders part of Austin "within China" (I'm reminded here of the Babylon 5
episode "Day of the Dead"), I have my doubts that they'd throw away all pre-
acquisition IP just to be able to make this claim. I guess they might have
done so regardless to develop something with a newer workflow (e.g. for better
verification), but my understanding is that it's not unusual to ship ~20-year-
old HDL cores (e.g. UARTs) that are just synthesized with different gate
libraries.

~~~
Chaebixi
> I have my doubts that they'd throw away all pre-acquisition IP just to be
> able to make this claim

China doesn't seem to be above claiming that they "domestically developed"
technology that they really acquired from foreigners. An example I'm aware if
is China's "home grown" 3G cellular protocol called TD-SCDMA. It was really a
failed European standards proposal from Siemens, but passed off as an
indigenous Chinese development for prestige reasons.

See [https://www.samizdata.net/2012/06/here-is-the-
rac/](https://www.samizdata.net/2012/06/here-is-the-rac/)

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vasili111
Do they have meltdown and/or spectre bug?

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deepnotderp
They have spectre, any CPU with speculative execution and caches of any sort
(excluding some capability machines, no ROP exploit machines and PLB enforced
SASOS machines), including branch prediction (!) is vulnerable to spectre.
(For those of you not in comp arch, that roughly translates to "literally
every single non embedded CPU, and then some")

That's what makes the flaw so deep and troublesome.

~~~
qwerty456127
Is speculative execution actually worth it? Can't compilers do the job and
optimize execution sufficiently so we won't need speculative execution?

Anyway, "caches of any sort" sounds frightening: I can remember disabling all
the caches on Pentium-3 to make it about as slow as 80386 so some ancient
games that can't run on fast CPUs would run ok and be playable.

~~~
thristian
Speculative execution is a workaround for the fact that CPUs read and process
data much more quickly than main memory can provide it. The CPU tries to trace
as many code-paths as possible so it can discover which memory addresses are
likely to be used in the near future and queue them up so they'll be ready in
the local cache when they're needed.

Smarter compilers wouldn't really help, this is all about how the code is
running for the next millisecond on this specific workload on this specific
CPU, rather than how it's running today or on this cluster or in general.

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sharemywin
I surprised most cpu chips don't have government back-doors in them.

~~~
jjawssd
ARM Trustzone

[http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzon...](http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzone/)

AMD PSP

[http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-
technologies/s...](http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-
technologies/security)

~~~
jjawssd
Fixed URL: ARM Trustzone

[https://www.arm.com/products/security-on-
arm/trustzone](https://www.arm.com/products/security-on-arm/trustzone)

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qwerty456127
Yet another 80386 on steroids with no 64-bit and no SSE or a real modern CPU
capable of running all the today OSes and apps efficiently?

~~~
krn1p4n1c
It's 64-bit + SSE4.2.

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fishmeat
Is this libreboot friendly?

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jlebrech
which socket is it?

