Zhaoxin's KX-7000
12 comments
·April 30, 2025marcodiego
Hmmm.. it maybe free from IME! Maybe the FSF want a word with them.
hawflakes
Minor nit. Compound pinyin words shouldn’t use StudlyCaps so it should be “Lujiazui”
daniel_iversen
This is interesting! Does anyone know how China’s reliance on chips from intel and amd is in the non-AI space (so regular consumer and server loads)? I’m wondering how it was 10 and 5 years ago, now, and how we predict in the next couple of years. Surely if they’re not mostly using their own chips they will very soon right?
daniel_iversen
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Merrill
How would use of the Kylin OS instead of Windows 11 affect the user's perception of performance?
IncreasePosts
What's the deal with the municipal government being a partner in this project? Is that structure common in china? Is it just them giving VIA tax breaks and things, or are they more involved than that?
markus_zhang
Yeah it is pretty common. Governments invest in key area corporations to provide fund, tax breaks, regulatory aid and a bunch of other benefits, and sometimes sell its chunk of shares in a few years.
One early example is Chongqing government with Huang Qifan as mayor back in the 2010s.
Havoc
Yeah. They know the chips aren’t commercially competitive so they just create artificial demand by making gov and state controlled entities buy it.
Basically an attempt to bootstrap an industry brute force style
fspeech
Do governments allow some of their employees to be highly compensated relative to others? Would someone with real expertise in chip development work for the government at what the government is willing to pay? I think the answer is no.
wmf
The Chinese government has definitely "bought back" some top talent from the US. It's probably a small number of people.
I'm not sure why local governments would get involved although in general China has had a problem with too much investment and not enough places for it to go. It's not impossible that there are essentially local sovereign wealth funds.
jenny91
Yes, it's very common in China.
Love reading these highly detailed analyses. Short version: Zhaoxin's currently competitive with 2010/2011-era AMD and Intel, with some asterisks around RAM speed.
There is to my mind a sort of race to get up to "fast enough to host H100 competitor AI hardware" with non-US IP that makes sense to engage in. In those terms, it looks like they're maybe 2 revs away -- I'm not sure what process node the KX7000 is on, but there's some architectural work to finish up. That said, this is interesting. I assume the chips will continue to improve from Zhaoxin, unless they lose their core team.