The article says that while the chip shows promise, it falls short of competing with AMD and Intel’s offerings.

Developed by Shanghai Zhaoxin Integrated Circuit Co., the KX-7000 aims to carve out a niche for China in a sector dominated by the two giants. Zhaoxin CPUs are built on intellectual property acquired from Centaur Technology.

The KX-7000 is the successor to the KX-6000, released in 2019. Although the KX-7000 series was initially slated for a 2021 launch, the first compatible hardware only became available this year.

PC Watch’s performance benchmarks show that while the KX-7000 has made strides over its predecessor, it lags behind Intel’s older 8th-generation Core i3-8100 in single-thread performance. Multi-threaded workloads, however, show improvement due to its higher core count. It’s compatible with AVX and AVX2 instructions but lacks support for AVX-512.

This makes it a valuable chip for primary desktop or office applications, but it runs out of steam when you give it more demanding software and games. Its integrated graphics, the ZX C-1190, supports DirectX 12 and OpenGL 4.6, but are like a low-end GPU from a decade ago.

So, while it is a step forward for Zhaoxin, it will need to do a lot more work before it can truly hope to compete with global rivals.

PC Watch said: “If this could be distributed cheaply across China, it might gain traction… but with the current dominance of ultra-cheap mini-PCs equipped with Intel’s N100 series unless there’s a specific need for China’s unique encryption standards like SM2, SM3, or SM4, it’s unlikely that the current low-profile sales strategy will change.”

A KaiXian KX-7000/8 setup costs around $270 for the CPU, with an additional $135 for the motherboard. The processor uses an LGA1700 socket similar to Intel’s (so it can accommodate standard CPU coolers), but the internal structure is entirely different and incompatible with Intel motherboards.