Zhaoxin's KX-7000

Zhaoxin is a Chinese x86 CPU designer. The KaiXian KX-7000 is Zhaoxin’s latest CPU, and features a new architecture dubbed “世纪大道”. 世纪大道 is a road in Shanghai called “Century Avenue”, following Zhaoxin’s practice of naming architectures after Shanghai landmarks. Zhaoxin is notable because it’s a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai municipal government. It inherits VIA’s x86-64 license, and also enjoys powerful government backing. That’s a potent combination, because Zhaoxin’s cores are positioned to take advantage of the strong x86-64 software ecosystem. x86-64 compatibility is just one part of the picture, because performance matters too. Zhaoxin’s previous LuJiaZui, implemented in the KX-6640MA, was clearly inadequate for handling modern applications. LuJiaZui was a 2-wide core with sub-3 GHz clock speeds and barely more reordering capacity than Intel’s Pentium II from 1997. Century Avenue takes aim at that performance problem. Core Overview Century Avenue is a ... Read full article.