Zhaoxin

Zhaoxin ("Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Co., Ltd." ) is a fabless semiconductor company, created in 2013 as a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. The company creates x86 compatible CPUs. The term "Zhào xīn" means "million core". The processors are created mainly for the Chinese market: the venture is an attempt to reduce the Chinese dependence on foreign technology.
Background.
"Zhaoxin" is a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. In 2021 it was reported that VIA has a 14.75% shareholding in the company. China has a domestic policy to "replace all foreign hardware and software from its public infrastructure with homegrown solutions". VIA holds a x86 licence which allows its subsidiaries to produce compatible microprocessors; this allows Zhaoxin's development of their chips.
Architecture.
The architecture of the initial ZX family of processors is a continuation of VIA's Centaur Technology x86-64 Isaiah design. The ZX-A and ZX-B are based on VIA Nano X2 C4350AL. The ZX-B is identical to the ZX-A, except that it is manufactured by Shanghai Huali Microelectronics Corporation (HLMC) . The ZX-C is based on the VIA QuadCore-E & Eden X4. Zhaoxin terms the architecture "Zhangjiang", however it is thought the basis is the VIA Isaiah 2 architecture. Like the VIA processors they were based on, early ZX processors are BGA (FCBGA and HFCBGA) chips sold pre-soldered onto a motherboard.
Zhaoxin came to the North American & European technology press' attention with the ZX-D processor, and its plan for future products, in late 2017/early 2018. Zhaoxin calls the ZX-D architecture "Wudaokou" and is a complete re-design of the VIA Isaiah. This is a departure from earlier microarchitectures such as ZhangJiang which were a lightly modified version of VIA Technologies (Centaur) architecture. WuDaoKou is a new and complete SoC design. Changes to the ZX-D include the integration of the northbridge like modern x86 designs, as well as additions of Chinese cryptographic functions. The ZX-D series also has integrated graphics processing unit (iGPU) based on S3 Graphics technology (previously owned by VIA).
The former ZX naming was dropped around 2018, for the KX ("KaiXian") designation for desktop processors, and KH ("KaisHeng") designation for server processors.
The KX-6000 (formerly ZX-E) system on a chip was demonstrated to press in September 2018. The architecture, an evolution of the ZX-D architecture, has been named "Lujiazui". In June 2019 the KX-6000 was reported to be built on a 16 nm TSMC process. The chip has a DirectX 11.1 compatible iGPU.
Discrete GPU.
In 2020 Zhaoxin announced it was planning to release a dedicated graphics cards.
Uses.
Zhaoxin processors have mainly been used for Chinese laptops.
Performance.
The Zhaoxin ZX-C+ 4701 CPU was reviewed in 2020, and showed significantly worse performance against older Intel (i5 2500K) and AMD (Athlon 3000G) processors. The ZX-D is noted to have roughly the performance of the Intel Silvermont (Avoton) processors.
The ZX-E / KX-6000 is reported to have a 50% performance increase over the KX-5000, and comparable performance to a 7th generation Intel i5 core processor from 2016 (namely the Core i5-7400). The 8-core ZX-E U6780A was reviewed by Linus Tech Tips in August 2020. The review processor was benchmarked to be slightly slower than a 3rd generation Intel i5 quad-core processor using Cinebench. Gaming performance was noted to be poor, whilst the machine itself was noted to be expensive for its performance by 2020 standards. Tom's Hardware also reviewed the U6780A and reported poor gaming performance in 2020.
The aim for the ZX-F series is for performance parity with the 2018 series Ryzen processor.