A Chinese Intel competitor? - YouTube

- Zhaoxin

- [Andy] Zhaoxin

- Kaixin

- [Andy] xian

- That thing.

- [Andy] That thing.

- Meet the Zhaoxin Kaixin CPU.

Look, I'm trying my best, okay?

This is a real fascinating one, ladies and gentlemen.

This is not made by AMD or Intel, obviously,

'cause they wouldn't have called it that,

but supposedly it is X86 compatible?

- It is an X86 core based on some Western designed products,

I believe.

- So would it be fair to call it a ripoff X86 CPU?

- No, I don't think so.

- So what is it, then.

- Guess we'll have to find out.

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(upbeat music)

Where do you wanna start on this?

Should we boot it up first?

Should we take the cooler off and have a look at it first?

- I think we should have a look at it first

and see what we're dealing with.

- All right, you've got regular DDR4 memory,

is this single channel, dual channel?

- I believe that's, I think it's dual channel.

It may not be.

- What's remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is.

24 pin power, four pin CPU connector,

got your regular PWM fan connectors, PCI express,

M.2, it's got all the modern features I would expect,

just in like a slightly larger than ITX,

I forget what this is called, it's not DTX,

'cause it's three spots, but it's just a bit of weird,

Frankenstein form factor, that's the most

bizarre thing about it.

It's just like a normal looking motherboard.

Even the IO, I would describe as like perfectly reasonable.

- Yeah, like it's kind of a lower end IO kinda thing.

- Yeah.

- You got the serial port, the VGA port,

but that's actually useful in industrial environments.

- It's even got a parallel port if you wanna

plug in like a ribbon cable.

Hook up that dot matrix.

- Dot matrix, or like SCADA HMI's stuff.

- There's nothing about it on the surface

to indicate that this is anything other than

a normal computer, until whoa!

That's the Zhaoxin Kaixin.

There are a few things that we can tell immediately

about the HX002EA, was it?

- Yes.

- One is that it has onboard graphics,

because clearly this VGA and HDMI port

need to be powered by something,

two, all of its IO appears to be built directly

into the CPU itself, because this is a very, very simple

PCB.

We can go straight from the CPU to the PCI express slots,

dead straight line, same for the RAM,

that appears to be no additional

controller, or like northbridge, or southbridge,

or anything like that on the motherboard.

What can you tell us about the specs of this chip,

like is it single core, dual core?

What frequency does it run at?

What do we know about it?

- This is an eight core.

- Really?

- At 2.7 Gigahertz.

It is the Kaixin KXU6780A,

and it's based on VIA's Isaiah core.

- Really, so this has something to do with VIA then?

- They've managed to add a bunch of different features,

including China's homegrown hashing algorithm,

SM3 and HM4, as well as increasing the IPC

by 25%, and then another,

I think, 2x or something like that.

It's pretty crazy.

They've added an S3 processing core

for the GPU, which, I don't know if you remember S3,

but they used to be kind of a big deal

before they kind of faded away.

- Nothing that impressive today, probably,

but I guess we'll see.

- Yeah.

- This could, I mean, they have

an actual X86 license then.

- Yeah.

- Through VIA?

- Yeah.

- So this could actually just like

be plug and play?

This is crazy town,

of course it has perfectly normal HD audio,

everything about it is just so normal,

that's what's tripping me out here.

- Not only that, but did you notice

their mounting for the CPU core?

- Oh yeah, I noticed that they're using an Intel spec

backplate, but just there's no holes for it to screw

on the socket mount, because there's no socket.

- Yeah, there's adhesive on that backplate,

I actually installed it earlier on.

- But theoretically you could install

any LGA115X cooler on this thing, couldn't you?

- Theoretically, but not practically.

- Because of the height of the CPU die.

- No, there's a bank of capacitors here,

that interferes directly, it just barely clears them.

- Okay, there we go, Biosoft.

Holy...

(beep)

So I'm just windowsing right now.

I'm running 60 hertz, 4K, with my Zhaoxin C9 60 series

GPU, at 400 megahertz, 10bit DAC.

- It's worth mentioning that in order to get the graphics

to work, I actually had to go and dig up a driver

from HP's website.

HP actually has a micro PC

that runs on the Zhaoxin architecture.

- What they do not?

- They do.

- Really?

Like for sale in China, or?

- I think it's for sale in China.

- What's Task Manager gonna look like?

Completely normal, eight cores, no SMT, so eight threads,

memory's just showing up real normal,

like 2130 megahertz, we weren't able to get into the BIOS,

so I don't even know if we can adjust that.

- We can get into the BIOS.

This is actually the UIFI installation of Windows,

so, we should be able to reboot into startup settings

and get there.

- Powered by the DOT,

codename Wudaokou, 28 nanometer.

- That's not correct, actually.

- Really?

- This should be the Lujia...

- [Andy] Lujiazui

Yeah, what he said.

It should also be 16 nanometer.

- 16 nanometer?

- The CPU ID is not reported correctly

in hardware development.

- It also says single channel memory,

so maybe that's not right either.

- It's not just any 16 nanometer either,

it's TSMC's Finfet.

- So this is like damn near cutting edge.

- More or less.

- Yeah, like not quite, but it's not far off either.

This thing, like is it good?

- I don't know.

- Okay.

- You should probably throw it up in some

Cinebench, maybe.

- All right, all right, all right,

we're gonna head over to Cinebench in a second.

- They claim that it competes with the core i5 7400.

- Shut up.

Oh, GPU Z seems to have a better idea

of what's going on here.

16 nanometer socket, 1548 turboing up to 2.7 here,

I saw that.

Whoa, that graphics core, though.

So look, I can actually move the mouse around here,

but it's like still dragging the window.

This thing just trips me out so hard,

so it does have some sort of,

something that reports as a chipset,

the KX6000.

- That's actually the CPU, so I believe it's all less a SOC.

- CPU-Z knows it's dual channel memory.

So let's fire up GPU-Z.

Oh, okay, so you just thought it was funny

for me to open up GPU Z and have it be completely blank?

- It's not funny, it's what it thinks the card is.

- There's nothing in here.

- It has no idea, it doesn't even know that there's

a GPU in there.

Even when it had the Microsoft basic display adapter driver,

it didn't know.

- Here we go, ladies and gentlemen, Cinebench R20.

- Eight cores.

- Eight cores, eight threads.

It's working, it's doing something,

it's not even terribly slow, as far as I can tell,

don't quote me on that though.

Still wrapping my brain around this one,

ladies and gentlemen.

No, it does seem slow, this seems slow,

this has gotta be slow.

I'm pretty sure this is slow.

Don't spoil it, don't spoil it.

- Well, I was just going to say that

one thing that Centaur Technologies cores

really kind of emphasized was the kind of

performance that their clientele needed.

And just making it...

- Cryptographic.

- Yeah, like adequate performance for certain work loads.

So their cores have generally been very simple

and very small.

And consequently also sip very little power.

- lttstore.com by the way.

All colors in stock.

It's done.

925 points, for context I have a IV bridge core i5 though,

that's a quad core at about 1000.

- To be fair, it's probably fine

for what they want to use it for.

- Let's game on it.

- You're not gonna even try the onboard?

- Oh come on, I couldn't drag a window around

not gonna even...

Do you want me to try it?

- It's a nothing burger, it doesn't work.

- Let's see if it just picks up this GPU right away,

and outputs to it.

And it immediately worked.

Time to benchmark this puppy.

Oh yeah, look at that.

It passes the window dragging around the screen test

with flying colors.

Let's fire up some CSGO here, ladies and gentlemen.

- The board that we got from Taobao

we paid about $617 US dollars.

- It's not cheap?

I thought that's the point of like Chinese knockoff stuff.

- Whoa, whoa, Litus, that's not the point,

the Chinese government has set a target

to reduce its consumption or use, I guess,

of hardware and software made by external vendors

by 2022, and this is a drop-in replacement.

- But it's so expensive.

- Well, you gotta look at it from the perspective

of where they were.

Just like four years ago, these cores were way slower,

and they were basically just modified Isaiah cores,

so like in kind of the trajectory they're on,

it could be a lot better very soon.

- But can they game, as long as they're not a kid,

and it's not bedtime?

30 fps in that CSGO right there.

More like CS slow.

Oh, wow, this does not run well.

As soon as the scene, you know what,

hold on one second, I wanna get a smoke.

- [David] Is this 4K?

- I do believe it is running in 4K, but with an RTX28,

it's 1080.

- Oh, I forgot I set a full screen 1080 start up option.

- That's terrible.

Okay, how bad is the smoke gonna kill me here?

Not too bad, not too bad,

still getting 30, 40 fps.

Oh, I'm getting shot though.

How are they even seeing me?

Oh wow, those frame drops though.

- [David] Oh no.

- No!

So close!

Okay, so I'm getting 200 fps right now.

- My guess is the game logic.

- Wait, does it seem to be getting better?

Like 40 here, no it's not getting better.

Walk faster, dance!

Pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew, pew!

So there you have it,

it sucks, and it's overpriced, but it doesn't suck

that much and if it follows the same trend

as other technology, the price shouldn't

stay that high for long.

Now all that remains is for us to check out some of the

other options that China has to reduce its dependency

on Western technology.

Make sure you are subscribed, cause one of them is like

not X86 at all.

One of them tries to emulate it, I think.

We got a whole bunch of crazy stuff off Taobao,

so it's gonna be freaking awesome over the next little bit.

Almost as awesome as my segue way to our sponsors.

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If you guys enjoyed this video,

maybe check out the crazy Chinese motherboard that

I fired up a little while ago

that had a graphics card baked into it,

like a G force one.

Like a real one, it's trippy.