As you know, China is looking to boost its semiconductor industry by designing and producing its own components. Among them are Moore Threads for graphics, and Zhaoxin for CPUs. The company’s latest product, the KX-7000/8, is disappointing, coming in behind a Core i3 from seven years ago!
Zhaoxin KX-7000/8: still not great..
Broadly speaking, the KX-7000/8 is a processor with eight cores and eight threads. While the processor sits on an Intel LGA-1700 socket, it is not compatible with Intel motherboards. This is presumably due to the mismatch between the pins on the Chinese CPU and those on Intel.
In short, this CPU benefits from an in-house architecture called Century Avenue. In terms of frequency, it boosts to 3.7 GHz with a base frequency of 3.5 GHz. As for caches, it has 4 MB of L2 and 32 MB of L3. Finally, it supports DDR4-3200 MT/s and DDR5 4800 MT/s memory.
However, despite an interesting specification sheet, in reality it can’t compete with a Core i3 8100 from eight years ago. In games, on the Final Fantasy XIV: Golden Legacy benchmark, it achieves 90% of the Core i3’s scores, compared with 60% on the Dragon Quest X benchmark.
On the Cinebench R23, it does not do too badly in multi-core, but it should be remembered that it offers twice as many cores as the Core i3 8100, while it takes a beating in single-core. The only tests where it does not do too badly are on 3DMark when paired with an RX 6400 and on CPU Profile when using 8 threads or more.
In any case, add a Ryzen 5 5600G to the equation and the game’s up: the Ryzen runs on everything.
In short, despite major investment in the semi-conductor sector, it’s clear that we’re not there yet. The conclusion remains the same: it’s hard to take the lead in a sector that has been dominated for decades by Intel and AMD.
