The rise of Chinese semiconductor companies is evident everywhere, even in the field of graphics solutions.
Until a few years ago, China was mainly presented as the "workshop of the world". This expression reflected a very real situation: production units were mainly developed in China to manufacture products designed and developed in North America, Japan or Europe, for example. Some particularly sensitive areas were almost completely out of reach for the country, which had to source them elsewhere, for example for its semiconductor needs. In order to ensure its independence in this field, but also to develop its own creative force, China has launched ambitious research and development programs.
Today, although some of the smartphone giants are indeed Chinese and the local automotive industry is becoming increasingly important, the components criticized still come from countries perceived as "competitors" such as the United States, Japan, South Korea or, worse, Taiwan. However, this situation is changing very quickly. Several Chinese foundries have greatly increased their production capacity to reduce this dependence, and various companies have taken on the task of designing fully Chinese components.
In the CPU and GPU domains, the objective is obviously to compete with AMD, Intel or NVIDIA and if we are still far from it, progress is real. Companies like Loongsoon or Zhaoxin have seen their CPU projects come to fruition and in the field of GPU, it is the company Jingjia Micro that is the most talked about, despite significant delays. Two years ago, the company mentioned a "forthcoming" graphics chip whose power could be compared to that of a GeForce GTX 1080, which had been out for a little over three years.
The JM9 series of GPUs was then supposed to go into production "quickly" in order to start marketing at the end of 2020. This was not possible, but Jingjia Micro is back in the news with new information on this series of GPUs that would now be taped out according to Videocardz.com. In the jargon, this means that the design of the component is finished and that it is now ready to enter its mass production phase. There will be two main models, the JM9231 and JM9271. The first one competes with the GeForce GTX 1050 with its 1.5 GHz frequency, its PCIe Gen3 x16 interface, its 8 GB GDDR5 and its HDMI 2.0 / DisplayPort 1.3 compatibility. The TDP is listed at 150 Watts and the computing power is said to be 2 TFLOPS.
The JM9271 is designed to be much more muscular than its little brother. It is also compared to the GeForce GTX 1080 from NVIDIA thanks to its computing power estimated at about 8 TFLOPS. To achieve this, we are talking about a TDP of 200 Watts on a GPU clocked at 1.8 GHz with a PCIe Gen4 x16n interface 16 GB HBM video memory and HDMI 2.0 / DisplayPort 1.3 compatibility. While the graphics card shortage is still with us, will China take advantage of it to get its hands on the game?
