Founded 10 years ago as a joint venture between Taiwan’s VIA and the Shanghai government to build domestically produced x86 CPUs, Zhaoxin is working on getting the Linux kernel to support its latest “Yongfeng” processors.

At the end of last year, Zhaoxin announced the KH-4000 series of server x86_64 processors using the “Yongfeng” architecture, which supports up to 32 cores. The “Yongfeng” architecture is the successor of the “Lujiazui” micro-architecture. It still uses 16nm technology and supports up to 32 cores. Compared with Lujiazui’s 8-core, it is a big leap forward. The frequency is up to 2.2GHz and supports PCIe 3.0 and DDR4. Although it is not as good as the latest processors from AMD and Intel, it is an improvement for domestic CPUs.

▲ Zhaoxin “Yongfeng” CPU

▲ Zhaoxin “Lujiazui” CPU

Recently, Zhaoxin engineers submitted the first batch of patches supporting the “Yongfeng” architecture to the Linux kernel. The content of the patch is mainly to add PMC support for the “Yongfeng” architecture.