VIA is working on the Zhaoxin KX-6000 octa-core CPUs, aims at becoming serious AMD / Intel competitor

Taiwanese company VIA was one of the most renowned motherboard component makers throughout the ‘90s, releasing chipsets that were even better then Intel's or AMD's own solutions. In the early 2000s, the company struck an agreement with Intel, which allowed VIA to design and manufacture proprietary X86 processors based on Intel’s socket infrastructure. Not much was heard from VIA since 2003, as the company has mostly ditched the global presence for a more localized and streamlined one. It also relies on TSMC to manufacture its products, since VIA itself is fab-less.

Earlier this year VIA finally announced that it has been working on processors that could rival those produced by AMD and Intel. The Taiwanese company is now collaborating with the Chinese government in order to facilitate the production of the new Zhaoxin KaiXian CPU series.

The latest 64-bit CPU from VIA is called KX-6000 and it is manufactured using TSMCs older 16 nm process. It may integrate up to eight cores running at up to 3 GHz and it even comes with a DX 11.1-comatible iGPU. Other features include dual-channel DDR4-3200 support, VMX virtualization technology and the usual I/O options like PCIe Gen 3 lanes, USB 3.0 connectors and SATA ports.

VIA has not yet released any benchmarks, but the performance should be comparable to Intel’s gen 7 CPUs. The new KX-6000 is expected to launch in 2019, with price points considerably lower compared to Intel’s gen 7 models.

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