News Chinese-designed "Dhyana" x86 processors based on AMD's Zen are beginning to surface
- Thread starter jmarin
- Start date
Very interesting indeed, maybe these will even be compatible with EPYC boards ? That would be very reminiscent of the very old school AMD (AMD K6) that were compatible with Intel socket boards.
It's possible. It's a licensing thing why Intel and AMD use different sockets.
AMD originally entered the market as a second supplier of 8088s whenever Intel couldn't meet demand, so they had to share the socket, but by the time Socket 7 came around the companies were competitors, so Intel did some legal wrangling such that nobody besides them could use Socket 8 and beyond. AMD updated Socket 7 to Super Socket 7 for their K6 line which other companies used, but by the time AMD was working on Athlon with a new socket, Cyrix and Centaur had been bought by VIA who had switched their focus to producing embeded systems and chipsets (having also bought S3 for graphics), and the rest of the companies producing x86 CPUs had exited the market or gone defunct. The use of one socket by multiple companies was very much not by design.
Given AMD sharing their IP, though, it may be possible for them to have shared chipset and socket designs. Given how China wants to reduce dependence on foreign goods, though, it is just as likely they would want to use incompatible designs.
A more wild idea would be to share a socket with VIA's Zhaoxin CPUs designed and produced in China.
On a side note, props to the author for remembering VIA exists.
AMD originally entered the market as a second supplier of 8088s whenever Intel couldn't meet demand, so they had to share the socket, but by the time Socket 7 came around the companies were competitors, so Intel did some legal wrangling such that nobody besides them could use Socket 8 and beyond. AMD updated Socket 7 to Super Socket 7 for their K6 line which other companies used, but by the time AMD was working on Athlon with a new socket, Cyrix and Centaur had been bought by VIA who had switched their focus to producing embeded systems and chipsets (having also bought S3 for graphics), and the rest of the companies producing x86 CPUs had exited the market or gone defunct. The use of one socket by multiple companies was very much not by design.
Given AMD sharing their IP, though, it may be possible for them to have shared chipset and socket designs. Given how China wants to reduce dependence on foreign goods, though, it is just as likely they would want to use incompatible designs.
A more wild idea would be to share a socket with VIA's Zhaoxin CPUs designed and produced in China.
On a side note, props to the author for remembering VIA exists.
Who would buy the rights to use bulldozer et. al.?
AMD is only licensing in China, so aren't adding competition in most of the world. China's a different beast because while China's growth is a big opportunity for companies, China has committed to achieving some technological independence, so selling the IP to be manufactured in China is more palatable than just selling chips, and may have better staying power. Not to mention while AMD isn't getting as much benefit from these licensed chips, it's still better for them than letting Intel and VIA have the market share.
The K6-2 Chomper got one of my college buddies through his Masters in engineering! So, not really relevant to the topic but super socket 7 baby!
Ok... Personally I think this is s good move for AMD to license in China. The Chinese want to home cook modern microprocessors and this deal could jumpstart that and bring some revenue for AMD. It’s a huge market and Its another shot at Intel market share there at least. Also, there are some camps that feel the IP will just be “borrowed “ at some point like a lot of others so cash in now!?
Sell it before they steal it is definitely an interesting angle, and there may be some truth to it. We have seen in the past the propensity for a fair number of Chinese companies to engage in IP theft and the Chinese courts usually side with the Chinese companies.
I think the real wild-card is Zhaoxin, which is a joint venture between the Shanghai Municipal Government (who holds the controlling interest) and VIA technologies (a Taiwaneese company). VIA designs the chips then Zhaoxin manufactures and sells them in China. Right now they aren't as good as the competition from what little information I can find, but they are aiming for parity with Ryzen this year (a tough job, but if it happens would really upset the market).
As far as VIAs track record, they've historically made low-power CPUs for embedded products continuing from what Centaur technologies had been doing before VIA bought them (Cyrix also got bought, but VIA canned them when they decided to pursue the embedded space), and their embedded processors obviously weren't as powerful as desktop and laptop CPUs, but they did tend to be slightly better than Intel's Atom processors in the same space. Both got more or less pushed out of the market by ARM. They also acquired S3 Graphics which they used for integrated graphics for their chipsets before iGPUs got integrated onto the CPU and most chipset functions also moved over. I haven't seen anything on how VIA's iGPU compares to the competition.
I think the real wild-card is Zhaoxin, which is a joint venture between the Shanghai Municipal Government (who holds the controlling interest) and VIA technologies (a Taiwaneese company). VIA designs the chips then Zhaoxin manufactures and sells them in China. Right now they aren't as good as the competition from what little information I can find, but they are aiming for parity with Ryzen this year (a tough job, but if it happens would really upset the market).
As far as VIAs track record, they've historically made low-power CPUs for embedded products continuing from what Centaur technologies had been doing before VIA bought them (Cyrix also got bought, but VIA canned them when they decided to pursue the embedded space), and their embedded processors obviously weren't as powerful as desktop and laptop CPUs, but they did tend to be slightly better than Intel's Atom processors in the same space. Both got more or less pushed out of the market by ARM. They also acquired S3 Graphics which they used for integrated graphics for their chipsets before iGPUs got integrated onto the CPU and most chipset functions also moved over. I haven't seen anything on how VIA's iGPU compares to the competition.
I don't see AMD signing up to help anybody else get close to Zen parity, unless these are crippled/cut-down semi-custom designs they're licensing.
Piledriver/Bulldozer/Excavator were plenty capable, if not as power- or IPC-efficient, as Intel mainstream CPUs - they just often got paired with stupid cheap OEM engineering (single-channel memory, slow memory, weak cooling, spinning disks, crappy screens) in the race to the bottom which (IMO, unfairly) tarnished the image of those architectures.
Piledriver/Bulldozer/Excavator were plenty capable, if not as power- or IPC-efficient, as Intel mainstream CPUs - they just often got paired with stupid cheap OEM engineering (single-channel memory, slow memory, weak cooling, spinning disks, crappy screens) in the race to the bottom which (IMO, unfairly) tarnished the image of those architectures.
- Jul 19, 2015
- 818
- 1,359
Apparently these CPU's are similar enough to Zen that the only changes needed on Linux to bring them up was adding the vendor and device ID's to the Zen driver.