Zhaoxin's Century Avenue: A Deep Dive into China's x86 CPU Ambitions
2025-04-30
Zhaoxin's latest CPU, the KX-7000, featuring the new "Century Avenue" architecture, aims to bridge the performance gap with early 2010s Intel CPUs. While showing progress with a wider 4-wide core and higher clock speeds, the KX-7000 lags in cache bandwidth, branch prediction, and memory subsystem performance. Single-threaded performance roughly matches AMD's Bulldozer, outperforming it in floating-point benchmarks but falling short in multi-threaded tasks against both Bulldozer and Intel Skylake. The article suggests the KX-7000 isn't designed to directly compete with AMD and Intel, but rather to meet China's demand for domestic CPUs, highlighting the technical and resource challenges in the pursuit of performance.