DDR5 memory and PCI Express Gen 5 are on the menu for a new processor "on a par" with AMD's Ryzen 7000.
When people think of microprocessors, they usually think of Intel. More and more often, the name AMD comes to mind, and the recent rise of artificial intelligence has also brought NVIDIA into the mainstream vocabulary, but that's about it. Admittedly, we're overstating the case, and any computer-savvy user will have other names to give, but the fact remains that the major companies in this sector are American... to the chagrin of China, which has been trying for many years to advance its own industry so as to no longer depend on foreign solutions, particularly American ones.
Zhaoxin sticks to its roadmap © Zhaoxin
Zhaoxin has been making headlines for some time now with its various processor ranges, and just over a year ago it was delighted to announce the arrival of the KaiXian KX-7000 series, which featured 7 nm etching, a maximum of 8 cores with 36 MB of combined cache and a frequency capable of reaching 3.7 GHz. At the time, Zhaoxin claimed to have doubled performance compared with its previous generation, the KX-6000, but several specialists looked into the matter and while the gains were real, they didn't really allow Zhaoxin to compete with the American brands: the best of the KX-7000s barely had the performance of a Core i3-8100, a chip launched in 2017 by Intel!
To mark the start of the new year, however, Zhaoxin could silence the bad tongues. The company has made further progress, and says it is preparing to launch the KaiXian KX-8000 range in the course of 2026. While there's no word on when this will happen, Zhaoxin does mention a 4 GHz frequency and support for such recent technologies as DDR5 memory and PCI Express 5.0. What's more, to coincide with the publication of the press release, Zhaoxin representatives spoke of significantly higher performance than the KX-7000 range: there is now talk of being able to compete with AMD's Ryzen 7000 in Zen 4 architecture. An assertion that remains to be verified, but one that would be in line with China's growing independence.
