"Trillion Core" Chinese CPU vs. AMD & Intel: ZhaoXin X86 CPU Review ZX-C+ 4701

there's one much talk over the last few years about homegrown Chinese x86 processors made by companies other than Andy and Intel the latter of whom owns the x86 license with some help we managed to get a full desktop system with one of those Chinese ax 86 processors this is the first non AMD non Intel x86 CPU that we've ever reviewed while reviewing the entire desktop in a separate video but this one will be focusing solely on the most interesting component the CPU which is the dashing Cayenne ZX c + c 4701 we checked with our office Chinese Mandarin teacher and the loose translation of J Sheen is trillion court or Megacorp if you prefer a name which might make AMD jealous for the former or Intel and it's mega tasking jealous for the latter this Shawn high-backed company's CPU is an up-and-coming alternative to Andy and Intel alike in today's video the older among you may be shocked to hear names such as via cyrix and centaur coming back to relevance before that this video is brought to you by the rake on everyday e25 wireless earbuds we've liked the rake on every dayi 25s for the relatively long wireless range something for which we've implemented a strict testing methodology that we've titled the Herculean phone das the e25 s have six hours of playback time and include a socketable pillow case with its own batteries so you get packaging that actually serves a functional purpose the pillowcase can recharge the earbuds up to an additional 24 hours without needing a cable the rake on earbuds also come in multiple colors and include different inserts to help customize for the best fit they're currently available for 15% off linked below or you can visit by Raycom slash gamers Nexus so this is the desktop the desktop is the Chou Shan TZ 561 - v3 I'm not sure the tones on Chau see on so we're gonna go with fried oven it's sold by saint automaton or th TF and it has an AM the r7 for 32 gigabyte video card which we had forgotten existed and it's got 8 gigabytes of ddr3 RAM it has a 256 gigabyte SSD by the extremely well-known brand foresee very well known and it's got a th TF designed VX 11 P - CM motherboard and our prize be joshing CPU so the CPU is a 2 gigahertz 4 core 4 thread solution no SMT on this one and it is not to be confused with high gan which we'll be talking out later the company that makes the Zen one based CPUs in China but instead something different will be reviewing the whole system again in a separate piece but for now we're focusing on just the CPU just for point of reference the entire system this whole box with the side panel cost a thousand USD it's about seven thousand R&B or so plus or minus a bit so it's somewhat staggering for the price you could build the cheaper system with better components in China even so it's not this isn't some like West versus East pricing difference it's just it's the parts in it that make it expensive and we'll talk about why with some theories later in this video so the first thing we did when we got the system was run some benchmarks on it it's got a custom OS on it that is going to be talked about in the system review but we installed Windows 10 for on our own SSD for a fairly standard and maybe slightly more controlled environment and ran a couple of tests now the bigger part of this content piece is going to be talking about the history of couching why via is involved how cyrix is involved and a couple of the other companies like like the high gan cpus and how they are related as well it's really interesting history for this one but we should get the quick benchmarks out of the wafer it's just a really set the stage on how good this thing isn't let's start off with the most successful test we have the most success with blender 2.79 we used our standard cpu benchmarking methodology so you can watch our video from last year read the methodology article from last year for that we use the monkey head and the Gion logo renders which we've designed in-house for use as cpu benchmarks these ran without any issues whatsoever well one one small issue the monkey head scene took 300 6.8 minutes to render you can take a look at that chart and the logo scene took a truly impressive four hundred and eight point nine minutes this is multiples upon multiples ahead of and these thirty nine ninety X it's not even close the Dow Shane CPU is one of the best CPUs we vet oh hang on I'm I'm being told that a bigger bar is actually worse not better so it's in minutes obviously and higher is worse for something like this anyway we had to leave it running overnight and that makes it hands-down the longest CPU test we've ever had to run to render either of these two images when we tested the two core for thread Athlon 200 GE back in 2018 it took a hundred 16.1 minutes to render the monkey heads the old Intel i5 2500 K was retested at the end of 2019 into this benchmark and that one managed ninety four point two minutes for the monkey heads the 2500 K as a reminder is from 2011 it's about nine years old now for the GM logo render the Athlon 200 GE required 144 point nine minutes the i5 2500 K required 121.9 minutes and the joshing CPU is 409 minute results marks even the 200 GE as needing 65% less time to render the 200 GE and the 2500 K are also both overclockable and as far as we can tell the z XC plus is not or at least it's motherboard didn't allow us one or the other we checked and blender was definitely using all four cores it's working properly it's just that slow this was a software issue cinnamon char 15 would be the obvious choice for judging relative performance quickly since we have years of data logged for it but it refused to launch on the Joshi and CPU our 20 proves much more compatible and the z XC + managed a score of 300 for mark's multi-threaded and 82 and the single threaded that multi-threaded score is closer to the single threaded scores of modern CPUs and even still below those it's easy enough to find our 20 scores posted publicly online like an Hardware bought for example but just as a frame of reference the eight core 16 thread i7 6900 K being used to write this script scored 32 93 points multi-threaded and 346 single threaded without closing any tabs or background tasks we attempted to measure CPU power consumption with the current clamp over the 4 pin power cable the one going into the motherboard EPS both assuming that still the primary CP power on this new and untested for us platform the clamp read zero point zero amps when idling that desktop after being zeroed out and everything else and a wall meter read just twenty five watts for full system power draw idle it's obviously not possible that it's actually zero amps for the CPU idle so this platform may be configured to draw some idle power through the 24 pin connector instead the CPU just it's not registering on that EPS 12 volt because not drawing off power for our current clamp to measure it with the logo rendering and the CPU pushed to 100% utilization the clamp still only read 0.7 amps 8.4 watts and the full system wall draw was 51 watts the CPU heatsink was barely warm to the touch the entire PC consumed less than a standard light bulb would have a few years ago we took some additional measurements to be sure idle the 24 pins 12 volt cables measured at 0.4 amps 4.8 watts the 5 volt cables the red ones on the 24 pin measured at 0.7 amps or 3.5 watts and the 3.3 volt cables measured at 0.9 apps or 2.9 7 watts and we used our mod mat to quickly reference the locations of each of these pins if you want to do the same you can go to store documents access dotnet and order one of the mod mats we've got large and medium there so note that these cables Hulse R provide power to other devices the 24 pin that include the v RM the fans on the motherboard or the ones plugged into it and the GPU via its PCIe slot so it's not just CPU power we took the iStent test versus the delta when rendering when rendering the logo that is if the 24 pin 12 volt line increased between 0.5 amps and 1.2 amps depending on the scene for the 5 volt line it increased by 0.1 amps and the 3.3 volt cables also increased by 0.1 amps so we're between 8.4 watts and 18 watts total for the CPU depending on how much the board is pushing to other things like the vrm or the memory and depending on how the board is wired but it's pretty low power consumption either way we're a gaming site first of course so for this CPU exclusive part of the review we ran the only game from our suite that should typically be completely non GPU dependent that's civilization 6 it's turn time benchmark which resulted in an average turn time of 180 3.9 seconds creating a gigantic bar and blowing out the scale of our chart once again this is the best result we vet okay well being told that again a bigger bar is in fact worse for this benchmark so this is a turn time benchmark there's five turns in the between the time when you click and turn and your next turn starts and the average 184 seconds per AI player multiply that by five players or more depending and that's how long it takes to get to your next turn so basically you click and turn and you should leave the house and then it'll be your next turn when you come back this is one of this is the worst that we've ever tested in this benchmark the previous last place entry in our civics chart was the $50.00 to core 4 threat upon 3000 G at seventy two point six seconds average we allowed the benchmark to run overnight again and to add insult to injury it had crashed the desktop by the time we came back in spite of successfully completing the benchmark it just couldn't stay open after all that torture we can probably stop the performance benchmarking there you get the idea we've got comparatives for other CPUs in those charts so netbook performance and power consumption are what we're looking at for this CPU and for that for netbook performance and a CPU installed in a desktop obviously for $1000 you start to raise eyebrows at it well cover why anyone would bother in more detail in the system review but there are several reasons that China is invested in and interested in developing its own homegrown hardware massive disclaimer here before we get into the really interesting part of this piece we are not here to comment politically or socially on what's going on nor are we talking about the potential security implications of using these processors so we're just here to deliver you the factual explanations on why this low-end CPU is of such interest and this low powered computer hardware exists when China could just as easily buy Intel or AMD processors that are much better and at least retail are cheaper as well so all we're doing here is breaking it down factually there's no commentary beyond that native Chinese CPUs have been around for years like sunway fate hung lune Sun and Josh Shan the Bo x IC design corporation that designs lune Sun CPUs has been around since 2002 alone the lune Sun name is the anglicized version in Chinese it's long seen and that literally translates to dragon chip it's formerly known as the godson chip if you may have heard of that in the past many of these companies are fabulous working with the existing silicon manufacturers to produce the physical chips recently however the Chinese government has increased its investment in these companies and the adoption of their products over the past decade or so China's local and central governments have both shown increasing preference for indigenous technology on their procurement lists culminating in a full-on ban of US software and computers in government offices by 2022 the ban intends to remove hardware from US headquartered companies from government computers in China and even though a lot of the u.s. branded companies have headquarters in Taiwan being incorporated in the United States is enough to get their Hardware stricken from the options list for China one reason that China has made this change is America's frequently issued sanctions restricting the sale of technology to China and Chinese companies in 2015 for example the u.s. forbade Intel from selling Xeon and Xeon Phi chips to Chinese super computer manufacturers supercomputers including most of those in the West are commonly used for military and nuclear research so this band probably isn't surprising now to be clear here there is a line drawn where as far as we know for today anyway and in 2021 and the Intel CPUs will still be available on the Chinese market they're just not supposed to be used for government computers so that's the limitation out presumably where higher performance is needed they might be using them anyway but that's the line drawn consumers will still be able to get Andy and Intel CPUs at least as of recording today so AMD and Intel are the only major CPU companies even left these days there's no one else they've leveled the playing field mostly Intel has leveled the playing field although it's switched recently both of these companies are nominally American and with more sanctions and acted over the past couple of years the only remaining choice for China is to a it's high performance processors in the quantities needed for supercomputers by making them itself in general these back and forth sanctions and punishments inhibit technological development and advancement likely this is the intent of those sanctions but they also have the side effect of encouraging non AMD and non Intel competitors to pop up and start making their own CPUs necessity here is the mother of invention as always and it'll take a long time for joshing to catch up but it won't take nearly as long as it took Intel and AMD to get where they are today because the hard works been done the roadmap has been laid out for new silicon companies and although a lot of the truly secret parts of the inventions are still undisclosed AMD and Intel keep tight lips on all that it's not really been leaked it's still going to be a lot easier for a new companies to get to where these are today because the groundwork especially at the fabs has been laid for them it's not a scenario where like Andy and Intel they were waiting for fabs to catch up for a long time Intel still to move to a smaller process couching can kind of start there so it's it's not gonna have nearly as long of a road so where this is interesting for the Chinese government is that it wants parts for supercomputers and it's having trouble getting them because of the sanctions so it's going to make its own still despite sanctions there's no need to completely start from scratch when designing a new CPU some of the Chinese manufacturer is just license existing instruction sets like the mips-based lune sun cpus while others are directly based on existing chips like our joshing z ax c plus and we'll discuss those in more detail shortly one of the latter types stands out in particular the high gan diana series produced by an AMD chinese joint venture was recently looked at by Wendell from level one Tech's who's been talking about them in great detail on his channel in 2016 when the Zen architecture was still pre-release and Andy was searching for ways to claw its way back into profitability they created the Tianjin higuaín advanced technology investment co limited also not Hispanic which is much easy to say they also created the higuaín micro electronics company limited or HMC and the chengdu higuaín integrated circuit design company limited or high gan which takes an entire breath to say these were made in partnership with various Chinese companies Andy is the majority owner of fatik and of HMC while thetac is or was at this point the majority owner of high gan with permission from the United States departments of Defense and commerce as well as quote multiple other agencies within the US government and these sublicensed some version of the x86 64 Zhen one core and it's design - HM see hm sieve and went back and forth with high gan to develop a cpu high gan ordered CPUs from HMC HMC placed a production order with GlobalFoundries and then they sold the completed silicon on to high gan who assembled the finished CPUs and sold them these layers upon layers of companies made the high gan CPUs not American enough despite working with AMD that they satisfied the PRC government requirements that's why that whole mess existed the end products were essentially identical to first gen Rison and first gen epic processors that came out in the first half of 2017 but they were obfuscated and enough of a bureaucratic mess that everyone just sort of shakes their heads size and says okay and then moves on an attack and wendel of level 1 tax again have looked at the high gan processors in detail and have write-ups and videos on them if you'd like to learn more about those but we're looking at Tao Shan today and a couple of the other parts the reason we switched in the last section there - past tense though was because the joint venture between these companies was effectively killed in 2019 that ik was explicitly added to the hide states entity list along with high gan and HMC meaning that Andy was henceforth forbidden from supplying any intellectual property to those groups despite having majority ownership of them for a legal document though it's all surprisingly blunt and very readable to a non lawyer it reads quote pursuant to 7:40 4.11 be of the EA are the ERC determined that Chinese entity sugan and the whoosh eed young and institute of computing technology are involved in activities determined to be contrary to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States sugan also is as further described below the majority owner of high gan and high gan has ownership interest in Chengdu higuaín integrated circuit and Chengdu higuaín micro electronics technology accordingly the ERC has also determined that high gan Chengdu higuaín integrated circuit and Chengdu higuaín micro electronics technology pose a significant risk of being or becoming involved in activities contrary to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States so this is a lot of the interesting history behind these CPU companies the various subsidies the partial ownership AMD has in their subsidies and how we've gotten to where we are today a couple of other companies popped up in that quote from the the foreign entities list and sue GaN is one of them so sue Ghana is a super computer manufacturer the u.s. says that quote it has publicly acknowledged a variety of military and uses and end users of its high-performance computers not really surprising pretty much every supercomputer for the most part has military uses and although it's sad that's just the way that a lot of them are used some of them have been turned towards human malware recently so that least that's something positive being used for the supercomputers now since the Zen one IP that the venture was founded upon was reportedly very high level and did not include detailed RTL information like the recent big navvy leak did that left the Chinese companies high and dry with limited ability to develop further on and these intellectual property and e retained all the intellectual property and unless they left more unsecured notebooks connected to the network like they did last time high gan shouldn't have enough knowledge to in theory completely reverse-engineer the chips so also they're forbidden to do business with Global Foundries which is again nominally in American come that actually has some fabs in the US and it wasn't part spun off by Andy when they went fabless fortunately for AMD it had begun securing itself enough of a financial stronghold in the u.s. at this point that the loss of contract wasn't going to put it out of business because that contract although in 2016 was crucial to hedging against the uncertain future of Xen at the time it it was no longer necessary one's n+ and then two came out because they've done extremely well on the market at least relative to its size or especially relative to its size back to our CPU our CPU was created by a less ill-fated joint venture between via technologies that's a name from the past and the Shanghai Municipal Government the majority owner with the sanctions against that ik via is now one of three companies along with Intel and AMD that holds an x86 license via and tsmc the fab that via works with our Taiwanese companies so perhaps the US government is less able to control their activities although this is outside our area of expertise Josh Shane has also worked with the Chinese fab HL MC so yes this is now a joint venture between a state-owned Chinese company and between a Taiwanese company we're really lodging ourselves between a rock and a political place so we'll move along quickly in 1999 via acquired cyrix a once promising x86 company run into the ground by national semiconductor it also bought centaur technologies an active x86 CPU design house and remember that the x86 license is gold because only Intel can issue it just like only AMD can issue the x64 licenses with the licenses and intellectual property from these acquisitions via has been selling center-based x86 processors for the past two decades with several Eden and nano models released in 2011 those were the code names releases under the via brand name have been rare since but a server SRC named CH a or what we're going to call cha with an AI coprocessor was announced by centaur just last year unlike cyrix centaur has successful maintained its identity under its parent company with the co-founder and lead architect of the AI coprocessor Glenn Henry remaining president of the company until his partial retirements in 2019 vias x86 license is subject to renewal by Intel which owns the x86 license and the original 10-year agreement expired in 2013 however the FTC sued Intel in 2009 for using quote anti-competitive tactics to cut off rivals access to the market and deprive consumers of choice and innovation in the microchips that comprised computers central processing unit most people here remember that happening especially as it pertained to AMD this was back when Intel was doing more than just marketing development fund but was functionally bribing OMS to use only its parts in place of its competitors parts there's a fine line between MDF and illegal anti-competitive practices and Intel crossed that line so all of that factors in in 2010 the FTC approved the settlement that required Intel to among other things do the following quote modify its intellectual property agreements with AMD Nvidia and via so that those companies have more freedom to consider mergers or joint ventures with other companies without the threat of being sued by Intel for patent infringement further quotes offer to extend vias x86 licensing agreement for five years beyond the current agreement which expires in 2013 the first half of this requirement might explain why Sean hi Josh in semiconductor co limited came into existence the joint venture and why it was founded precisely in 2013 CP is based on via and Centaurs Isaiah architecture have also been released primarily under that brand since then so we've been using the term x86 here to talk about licensing but to be absolutely clear Josh Aten CPUs are 64-bit x86 64 chips their first two CPUs were the ZX - a and the ZX - B which were both based on the Nano X - CPU from 2011 the Nano X - CPU is - nano 3000 CPUs two thousand nine that were stuck on one died the ZX see is based on the Eden x4 while hardware info the software reports are z x - c plus as being a nano quad core c 4650 v ZX c plus is produced in both four core that's the Cayenne and eight core or kai-shan variants and no joshi and CPUs have SMT just to be clear on that so it's four and eight period the eight core consists of two dies linked via FSB which might start to sound a little bit familiar somehow JA shaytans naming conventions up to this point are a little less confusing than the underlying via CPUs but after the z XC + ja Shan began transferring to a different naming scheme the z-axis D or K X 5000 has the same basic specs as the ZX see plots but it's a single die SOC design with an integrated Northbridge and ddr4 support courtesy of a new wood dalco microarchitecture which is supposedly the first major divergence from the Centaur Isaiah base for what it's worth would thou Co roughly translates to five roads intersection it's named after a train station regardless of how much development assistance does or doesn't come from centaur there are real advances being made under the couching brand without just copy pasting older CPUs the ZX e or KX 6000 was a more dramatic performance upgrade moving to a 16 nanometer process and a three gigahertz clock speed on the Lujiazui architecture and to clarify z XC or KX 5000 etc are families of CPUs with multiple SKUs in between them and different configurations of core accounts and frequencies for it's just like others Wiki chip is the most fruitful english-language source of information on any of these CPUs they've had direct contact with J Sheen and centaur and both of those companies seemed pretty open so if you want to learn more of the history check out wiki chip our system came with a discrete GPU though but one other selling point of the ZX processors is that they're equipped with integrated graphics that's done through the chipset on our zxc plus but later CPU is like the ZX 5000 actually include an on-die GPU or an IP there are unsubstantiated reports that this architecture is based on IP from the s3 graphics solution many sources on Jiao shaitaan' CPUs cite the same fir onyx forum post by user via underscore s CX which contains a huge volume of very confidently stated and highly specific information about Chow in s3 HTC via centaur and hardware it's worth a read but we can't personally vouch for it s3 was founded in 1989 it floundered in the late 90s and that was with the rise of 3d accelerators it then spun off its graphics division and sold it to via actually in 2000 where they developed chipset iGPS until 2011 and they sold them to HTC according to the ZX 6 thousand spec sheet the integrated graphics support is up to 4k resolution and DirectX 11 so again catching up and quickly we have our doubts about some of the claims that the company has made they claim that they're going to achieve parity with Rison in 2020 Rison what given where we saw the performance and these benchmarks that seems actually impossible but we'll see that's supposed to be this year there are also claims of releasing seven editor parts in 2021 which we also sort of doubt but not about none of the doubt here is in the fact that J Sheen is making big strides it's just they're not that big so this ragtag assembly of old intellectual property has turned into a series of processors that is at very best a functional windows-compatible alternative to AM D and Intel CPUs it's not something we'd recommend bine even if you're in China because you can buy and the intent all parts for cheaper that are better this whole system even if you built it you go to watch on BAE se GE market or something which is not yeah you buy on Taobao or something too but you get it done cheaper with other parts so the real reason this exists seems to be that it's a municipal or state backed venture to create CPUs for his future supercomputers that's kind of our guest based on a lot of research subscribe for more please let us know what you think of this type of content there's a lot of information here that kind of bleeds between technology and global politics we try to stay away from the latter and give you more of the former but obviously it's you can't completely separate them given the topic so let us know we like this type of content it's long form research and journalism if you want to fund this type of effort because it's very expensive for the time cost to do it all you can help us out on patreon.com slash gamers Nexus or you can get something in exchange for your support on stored on cameras axis net and that'll help me keep Patrick funded to continue laborious Lee researching these types of topics because he did all the research on this one thanks for watching we'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 703,707

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, zhaoxin, zhaoxin cpu, zhaoxin kaixian, china x86 cpu, zhaoxin zx-c+ 4701 review, zhaoxin cpu review, zhaoxin vs intel, zhaoxin vs amd, chaoxiang tz561-v3 review, thtf, thtf monitor, thtf pc, thtf gaming pc, amd ryzen

Id: -DanhnASClQ

Length: 29min 56sec (1796 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020