Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP (tomshardware.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the aggressive-expansion dept.

Chinese-designed "Dhyana" x86 processors based on AMD's Zen microarchitecture are beginning to surface from Chinese chip producer Hygon. From a report: The processors come as the fruit of AMD's x86 IP licensing agreements with its China-based partners and break the decades-long stranglehold on x86 held by the triumvirate of Intel, AMD and VIA Technologies. Details are also emerging that outline how AMD has managed to stay within the boundaries of the x86 licensing agreements but still allow Chinese-controlled interests to design and sell processors based on the Zen design.

AMD's official statements indicate the company does not sell its final chip designs to its China-based partners. Instead, AMD allows them to design their own processors tailored for the Chinese server market. But the China-produced Hygon "Dhyana" processors are so similar to AMD's EPYC processors that Linux kernel developers have listed vendor IDs and family series numbers as the only difference. In fact, Linux maintainers have simply ported over the EPYC support codes to the Dhyana processor and note that they have successfully run the same patches on AMD's EPYC processors, implying there is little to no differentiation between the chips.

5 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Triumvirate?! by aaarrrgggh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does Via Technologies still exist?

    I guess the bigger question is really if x86 should be the basis for a new processor initiative from China.

    1. Re:Triumvirate?! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      x86 turned out to be good even though it's crap, at least for high performance applications.

      People thought that RISC was the way forward for performance, because you could make simpler hardware that would allow higher clock frequencies and more parallelism. But it turned out that you could use CISC instruction sets like x86 as an intermediate language that you recompiled on the fly, optimizing for each specific CPU and even the other threads executing in parallel in a way that no compiler ever could.

      So for performance x86 is great, even if it's not really what x86 CPUs actually execute internally. For power consumption RISC is much better, as we have seen with ARM.

      Of course all this is talking generally, for specific applications the answer might differ.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Re:China Finds Begins Production... by ArchieBunker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just business as usual at Slashdot. Incoherent summaries and easily spotted typos. On a side note does that mean I can buy these knockoff processors from Alibaba for a fraction of AMD's prices?

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
  3. x86-64? by reanjr · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I assume they're talking about x86-64, which is modern AMD technology, and not actually the x86, which is decades old Intel technology. I can't imagine anyone would want to build x86s for anything but legacy devices.

  4. Until they don't by raymorris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Many US companies have partnered with Chinese companies and it works great for a couple of years, until the Chinese company no longer needs anything from the US company. Once they get all the information they need, they have no reason to send any payments, or anything else, to the US company.