Completely left behind just a few years ago, Chinese companies are rapidly gaining ground in the GPU sector.
Just a few days ago, we reported on the progress made by China and, in particular, Zhaoxin, which presented the KH-5000. This processor, designed for servers, was one of the major advances made by Chinese industry: up to 96 cores (32 on its predecessor, the KH-4000), 30% higher IPC, 3 GHz maximum frequency (2.5 GHz on the KH-4000), 384 MB cache (64 MB on the KH-4000), 12 channels of DDR5 RAM (8 channels of DDR4 on the KH-4000) and 128 PCI Express Gen 5 lines (128 PCIe Gen 4 lines on the KH-4000).
The Lisuan eXtreme and its promising GPU © TechPowerUp
Today, the progress is not far from being identical, but in the sector of graphics processors, the famous GPUs. Lisuan Tech organized an event in Shanghai to present its new generation of GPUs, the G100 series. At present, there's no question of a vast range, but two cards have already been announced: the Lisuan eXtreme 7G105 and 7G106, the former aimed at developers in the field of artificial intelligence, the latter at PC gamers. In both cases, we're talking about a 6nm etch, but as China isn't yet independent at all levels, it needs TSMC - the Taiwanese chipmaking giant - to ensure production.
The Lisuan eXtreme 7G105 is an impressive graphics card with a total of 24 GB of GDDR6, known as ECC because of its built-in error correction function. The Lisuan eXtreme 7G106, on the other hand, is limited to 12 GB. An unmistakable sign of the latter's real power is that a single 8-pin power port is required to deliver the energy it needs. Incidentally, some 3DMark performance figures have been published: 26,800 points on the Fire Strike stage and a further 2,256 points on Steel Nomad. These figures obviously don't allow it to compete with the most recent cards, but real progress has been made and should allow all the latest games to run very smoothly... in Full HD (1080p) of course.
