We already announced a few weeks ago that VIA was preparing its return to the X86 processor market, something that has finally ended up happening with its new Zhaoxin chips to compete with AMD and Intel.
VIA Zhaoxin KaiXian 5000 and KaisHeng 20000
These new VIA Zhaoxin processors are manufactured using a process at 28 nm. That already puts them at a clear disadvantage compared to Intel and AMD chips that are produced at 14 nm and are thinking of leaping to lower processes. The Zhaoxin are based on the WuDaoKou architecture that gives designs of up to eight cores at an operating frequency of 2 GHz.
First of all, we have five KaiXian 5000 processors. The most powerful are the KX-U5680, the KX-U5580, and the KX-U5580M. Also, all of them comes with an eight-core configuration with 8 MB of L2 cache and at frequencies of 2 GHz, 1.8 GHz and <1.8 GHz. We turn to the KX-5640 and KX-5540 models formed by four cores. Also, that comes with an L2 cache of 4 MB and frequencies of 2 GHz and 1.8 GHz respectively.
The instructions include Intel VT-x, Trusted Execution Technology, SSE4.2, AVX, and AVX2. The chips have a total of 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes. And that comes with four additional lanes for further interconnection to a chipset or even an M2 slot. They include an integrated GPU that provides a maximum of 4096 x 2304 pixels at 60 Hz being compatible with DX11 and not with DX 12.