VIA will help the Chinese company with the production of its own processors

VIA was very well-known manufacturer of chipsets and earlier of CPU and now is not in the best financial statment, and there is little news about the company. However, the company is functioning and even leads active development of new chips.

Representatives of the company shared information about this at the China IC Design Conference, which was held in Beijing. In addition to 8-core x86-compatible processors, 4-core ones will also be released. KX-5000, like previous solutions, will be manufactured by Chinese contract chip maker Shanghai Huali Microelectronics Corporation. For this will be involved 28-nm LP-process technology.

KX-5000 assemblies can be supported by the ZX-200 south bridges. The latter will add USB 3.1 ports to the platform, including Type-C, SATA 6 Gb / s ports and Gigabit Ethernet. Interestingly, the ZX-200 bridge is manufactured using the 40-nm process technology, while bridges for AMD Ryzen, for example, ASMedia are released using the 55-nm process technology (the latest Intel chipsets use the 22-nm process technology).

Zhaoxin KX-5000 became the first Chinese SoC with dual-channel DDR4 memory support. The memory controller, like the video core VIA, is built into the processor. Also in the SoC there was a place for the audio controller, the PCI Express 3.0 controller and the HDMI, DisplayPort and VGA video ports. All of the above is enough to build a computing platform with the support of modern SSD-drives.

The new platform has already been certified to work under a number of Chinese operating systems and Windows 10. Earlier, based on Zhaoxin processors, Lenovo introduced the CF03-T laptop, and Tsinghua Tongfang Chaoxiang introduced the Z8000 desktop series.

The next solutions, information about which is not yet available, will be the 16-nm SoC KX-6000, for the release of which it is planned to attract TSMC (technical process 16 FF +).

The new VIA chips are likely to be used by the government of China in solutions where a guarantee of the absence of any backdoors is a must. They can also be distributed in Chinese educational institutions and scientific organizations.