Intel and AMD aren’t the only companies making x86 processors. A Chinese organization called Zhaoxin has been designing its own x86 chips for the past few years.
Up until recently those chips have only been available in computers designed for Chinese market. But now network attached storage company QNAP has introduced a NAS device powered by a Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-U6580 8-core processor called the QNAP TVS-675, and it’s expected to be available globally.
The TVS-675 features six drive bays for hard drives or solid state storage, two M.2 2280 slots for SATA or NVMe drives and two PCIe 3.0 x4 slots for storage, networking or other expansion cards. There’s also an HDMI 2.0 port with support for 4K/60 Hz output to TV or monitor.
QNAP hasn’t announced pricing yet, but while QNAP makes hardware for both home users and enterprise customers, the TVS-675 is aimed at small businesses. So don’t expect it to be particularly cheap.
Still, it’s an interesting bit of hardware as it’s one of the first devices powered by a Zhaoxin processor to marketed to customers outside of China. And while the TVS-675 is positioned as a network attached storage device, like most modern NAS hardware, it’s basically a computer with a specialized (Linux-based) operating system and support for lots of storage.
QNAP typically uses ARM or Intel Celeron processors for its entry-level devices, and AMD Ryzen or Intel Core or Xeon chips for higher-priced, higher-performance products. But the TVS-675 is something a little different.
With a 2.5 GHz ZhaoXin KX-U6580 64-bit, octa-core processor and ZhaoXin C-960 Graphics, the computer supports hardware-accelerated video transcoding, and AES-NI encryption. It comes with 8GB of DDR4 memory, but supports up to a total of 64GB.
In terms of general performance, though, the chip isn’t exactly a speed demon. I haven’t seen a lot of real-world performance reviews, but according to Passmark, it delivers similar multi-core performance to a previous-gen Intel Celeron J4105 quad-core processor, but lags behind that low-power Celeron chip in single-core scores.
Most likely QNAP developed the TVS-675 for the Chinese market, where the government is encouraging corporate and government agencies to use home-grown technologies, but the company decided to make the hardware available globally in case customers elsewhere were interested.
via Tom’s Hardware and NAS Compares
OK, now I’m convinced there is crawler bots,
that on every news about Chinese CPU or SoC,
post obvious propaganda comments about back doors, spying etc.
This is material for journalist investigation.
I’m not fan of Apple, but when Intel / AMD will have a SoC/CPU efficient as the Apple M1 ?
A little competition won’t hurt, it’s good for us the customers.
Companies hedging options, especially after what happened with Huawei.
I’m not sure if that’s not a reason to avoid for a network attached device probably full of your important files with IoT hacks and state-sponsored cyberwarfare as it is…
Agreed. The security enclave in the processor is likely rife with security override that the Chinese government could use to get outside control.
So it has Government state backdoors, just like Arm, Apple, AMD and Intel then !