Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs • Hacker News Board

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#21

Post by 0xcde4c3db » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 3:40 PM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #9

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #3

The page says "Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China", but other sources suggest that their cores are derived from Centaur microarchitecture. Anyone know what the truth is on this?

VIA bought Centaur, so you can argue that, tenuously. VIA is a Taiwanese company. Some people insist that being Taiwanese is being Chinese.

Even granting the considerable stretch that the VIA acquisition somehow renders part of Austin "within China" (I'm reminded here of the Babylon 5 episode "Day of the Dead"), I have my doubts that they'd throw away all pre-acquisition IP just to be able to make this claim. I guess they might have done so regardless to develop something with a newer workflow (e.g. for better verification), but my understanding is that it's not unusual to ship ~20-year-old HDL cores (e.g. UARTs) that are just synthesized with different gate libraries.

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#22

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 3:42 PM UTC

Coding_Cat wrote: post #16

sanxiyn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VIA bought Centaur, so you can argue that, tenuously. VIA is a Taiwanese company. Some people insist that being Taiwanese is being Chinese.

Taiwan insist it's Chinese. Its government claims to be the rightful government of the whole of China.

The People's Republic of China and the Republic of China both agree there is a single China which includes Taiwan. They differ over who should govern it.

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#23

Post by klodolph » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #19

madez wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument of national security goes a long way.

It certainly goes a long way towards redirecting money to favoured state companies and building protectionist barriers, yes. Whether it provides any actual security is another matter.

Are you aware of historical events like the 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion? It was allegedly caused by sabotaged software inserted by a Canadian company on behalf of the CIA.

Modern chips are certainly dense enough and have enough layers that you can hide Trojans in them. Buying e.g. routers with Chinese ICs is a credible threat to the US government.

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#24

Post by djsumdog » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #2

This is VIA Technologies. Details here: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/via-chinese-x86-soc-2019,36...

Ah, the old VIA chips, which VIA built from the tech they bought from Cyrix. If you're interested in the history of Cyrix and some of the older x86 compatible chips, here's a great video on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWGAdoMz1c0

Also these Zhaonix's are just 32-bit right? I didn't seen anything on the site about supporting x86_64.

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#25

Post by djsumdog » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #9

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #3

The page says "Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China", but other sources suggest that their cores are derived from Centaur microarchitecture. Anyone know what the truth is on this?

VIA bought Centaur, so you can argue that, tenuously. VIA is a Taiwanese company. Some people insist that being Taiwanese is being Chinese.

But if you go back far enough, that tech actually came from Cyrix, an American company. I highly doubt they rewrote everything.

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#26

Post by skykooler » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

deepnotderp wrote: post #17

vasili111 wrote: post #15

Do they have meltdown and/or spectre bug?

They have spectre, any CPU with speculative execution and caches of any sort (excluding some capability machines, no ROP exploit machines and PLB enforced SASOS machines), including branch prediction (!) is vulnerable to spectre. (For those of you not in comp arch, that roughly translates to "literally every single non embedded CPU, and then some") That's what makes the flaw so deep and troublesome.

What about Atom? As I understood it Atom processors did not use speculative execution.

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#27

Post by andyana » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #24

sanxiyn wrote: post #2

This is VIA Technologies. Details here: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/via-chinese-x86-soc-2019,36...

Ah, the old VIA chips, which VIA built from the tech they bought from Cyrix. If you're interested in the history of Cyrix and some of the older x86 compatible chips, here's a great video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWGAdoMz1c0 Also these Zhaonix's are just 32-bit right? I didn't seen anything on the site about supporting x86_64.

No, they mention 32/64 on the specs pages.

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#28

Post by itsameta4 » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 4:09 PM UTC

skykooler wrote: post #26

deepnotderp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have spectre, any CPU with speculative execution and caches of any sort (excluding some capability machines, no ROP exploit machines and PLB enforced SASOS machines), including branch prediction (!) is vulnerable to spectre. (For those of you not in comp arch, that roughly translates to "literally every single non embedded CPU, and then some") That's what makes the flaw so deep and troublesome.

What about Atom? As I understood it Atom processors did not use speculative execution.

That was only the case until 2013 or so. Modern Atoms are vulnerable.

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#29

Post by candiodari » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #10

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #3

The page says "Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China", but other sources suggest that their cores are derived from Centaur microarchitecture. Anyone know what the truth is on this?

>"Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China" Yes, just not that China, another one

Well, given the territorial claims, yes, kind of that one. It just depends which government you believe as to whether the island of Taiwan is occupied territory, or everything else in China is occupied territory.

And these are governments we're talking about, so, needless to say, both sides killed millions to make this happen. Not because those people that got killed worked for the other side or were doing anything at all (not even protesting most of them), but merely because they wanted to frighten the rest enough to not do anything against them.

One of the nicknames for one of the actions of the Taiwanese government was "the White terror" (death toll: at least 10000, there had been a protest march against them, so naturally ...), the mainland Chinese government had a policy that each little town had to have at least one public execution, and millions died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Taiwan#Republic_of_...

Re: Zhaoxin's x86 CPUs

#30

Post by guan » Thu, Jan 04, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #29

baybal2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Zhaoxin's home-grown x86 CPU is completely designed from the ground up within China" Yes, just not that China, another one

Well, given the territorial claims, yes, kind of that one. It just depends which government you believe as to whether the island of Taiwan is occupied territory, or everything else in China is occupied territory. And these are governments we're talking about, so, needless to say, both sides killed millions to make this happen. Not because those people that got killed worked for the other side or were doing anything a…

It’s worth noting that while the government in Taiwan still officially claims all of China, the government is currently led by a president (Tsai Ing-wen) whose party does not whole-heartedly endorse that position.