News First gaming PC motherboard made entirely with China tech comes with integrated homegrown CPU — $700 buys the claimed world's first totally China-m...

[Admin]

Beijing Jite Intelligent Technology claims it has made China's first completely domestic motherboard with a Chinese Arm CPU onboard.

First gaming PC motherboard made entirely with China tech comes with integrated homegrown CPU — $700 buys the claimed world's first totally China-m... : Read more

 

[digitalgriffin]

Good for them.

 

[peachpuff]

comes with a Chinese-developed Arm CPU

I didn't know arm was created in china...

 

[Findecanor]

From tests on other web sites*, each FTC663 core performs very close to what a ARM Cortex-A72 does at the same clock speed.

The Raspberry Pi 4 has four A72 clocked at 1.5-1.8 GHz. This chip has twice as many cores, clocked at 2.3-2.6 GHz. (if the same as in the articles linked from this)
So, roughly speaking: It should be as fast as one and a half to three Raspberry Pi 4.

* (Not sure what am I allowed to post..)

 

[artk2219]

it does bring to mind the whole China arm fiasco. I think this has been resolved-ish, it was still a mess.

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-semiconductor-heist-of-the-century

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/rogue-arm-china-ceo-replaced

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/In-Depth-How-SoftBank-wrested-back-control-of-Arm-China

 

[TerryLaze]

Also "gaming PC motherboard" and ARM CPU...lol, and I'm not gatekeeping mobile gaming is still gaming but you still don't call this a gaming PC.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I don't see why it wouldn't be capable of gaming. An almost 11 year old 4770K is fast enough for 4K60 and 1080p120 gaming (with an RTX 3080), if the Feiting D2000 is half as fast as a 10 year old Intel CPU, it's a capable 60fps CPU, assuming you can get your hands on a dGPU that can perform.

 

[digitalgriffin]

I don't see why it wouldn't be capable of gaming. An almost 11 year old 4770K is fast enough for 4K60 and 1080p120 gaming (with an RTX 3080), if the Feiting D2000 is half as fast as a 10 year old Intel CPU, it's a capable 60fps CPU, assuming you can get your hands on a dGPU that can perform.

It's arm. 99% of games aren't optimized for ARM. Remember what a failure transmeta was? (Sorry Linus T.)

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

It's arm. 99% of games aren't optimized for ARM. Remember what a failure transmeta was? (Sorry Linus T.)

Which is true, BUT if they can create an efficient x86 translation layer, like Apple did, then that's not an issue.

 

[MobileJAD]

Where do you live and how important are you? Depending on your answers, being spied on by China might be far preferable than being spied on by the U.S. On the other hand, you could become part of a botnet or shut down quickly in a "cyber offensive".

Following this conversation I wish I could just make my own cpu, like that one guy I read about awhile ago, but that cpu was nowhere even close to being a 386 and most likely couldn't run DOS.

 

[bit_user]

Good for them.

Uh, so following the links from the article, the cores are described as follows:

"FTC663 cores clocked at up to 2.6 GHz and based on the company’s latest ARMv8 microarchitecture featuring a four-issue out-of-order pipeline"
​

The Raspberry Pi 5's Cortex-A76 cores have 4-wide decoders. So does Nehalem. @Findecanor is probably right that the rest of the core is probably less sophisticated than an A76, giving it closer to A72 performance.

Call it "good", if you want, but I don't envy them.

I don't see why it wouldn't be capable of gaming. An almost 11 year old 4770K is fast enough for 4K60 and 1080p120 gaming (with an RTX 3080)

You should link what review you took that from, so we can see how old it is and what games those were. I'm sure those same CPUs and that GPU wouldn't fare as well on the set of games Jarred uses in current hardware reviews.

It's arm. 99% of games aren't optimized for ARM. Remember what a failure transmeta was? (Sorry Linus T.)

Smartphones are ARM-based - as is Nintendo Switch. Are you saying there are no games for them, or that they're not optimized?

 

[bit_user]

until and unless every chip was forensically deconstructed and studied for security

You could do that and find nothing, but that doesn't mean it's free of backdoors.

It turns out there don't need to be any backdoors baked into the silicon. All they have to do is lock it down so it only boots signed OS images. Then, the government can only sign OS releases which contain their mandated backdoors or whatever. This is a superior approach, since it lets them close compromised backdoors and open new ones, in later OS releases. If you baked the backdoors into the hardware, then you're hosed if an exploit for it ever gets into the wild.

I'm not saying the do this, just that they could.

 

[bit_user]

How many times just in the last few months has China CLAIMED that some piece of hardware was 100% home grown only to find out that it was a rebranded something else that was actually made in Taiwan...

Well, this CPU is slow enough that it's not at all hard for me to believe it really is a home-grown design.

My first thought was that they licensed ARM Cortex IP, but apparently not.

 

[matlia.alban]

I didn't know arm was created in china...

It isn't, like everything else.
ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) is a British company

 

[Geef]

OP. Please make sure to update your story if/when something talked about above is discovered.

Thanks,

 

[digitalgriffin]

Uh, so following the links from the article, the cores are described as follows:

​

"FTC663 cores clocked at up to 2.6 GHz and based on the company’s latest ARMv8 microarchitecture featuring a four-issue out-of-order pipeline"​

​

The Raspberry Pi 5's Cortex-A76 cores have 4-wide decoders. So does Nehalem. @Findecanor is probably right that the rest of the core is probably less sophisticated than an A76, giving it closer to A72 performance.

Call it "good", if you want, but I don't envy them.


You should link what review you took that from, so we can see how old it is and what games those were. I'm sure those same CPUs and that GPU wouldn't fare as well on the set of games Jarred uses in current hardware reviews.


Smartphones are ARM-based - as is Nintendo Switch. Are you saying there are no games for them, or that they're not optimized?

I'm saying they are selling PCs which are dominated by x86 games. And while the number of games using .net core are growing, it pales to native x86 optimized code used by game engines. .net still has its performance weaknesses when it comes to processing large data arrays.

For office related work it's fine. I'm not calling it is a good processor. I'm saying "good for them being independent"

 

[peachpuff]

It isn't, like everything else.
ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) is a British company

Oh ok... does someone want to let the author know the article is wrong then?

 

[j_123]

I didn't know arm was created in china...

All it's saying is that this specific ARM CPU was created in China.

 

[j_123]

First gaming PC motherboard made entirely with China tech...​

Surely you mean "with Chinese tech...".

 

[nookoool]

Something doesn't sound right about the price. Maybe they are trying to grift money from the government for made in china 2025? A loongson board + 3a6000 cpu which I believe is more powerful were running for only around 200-300$. This particular ARM has been selling as a mini pc from a German company for around 400 euro a couple years ago as well.

 

[bit_user]

I'm saying they are selling PCs which are dominated by x86 games. And while the number of games using .net core are growing, it pales to native x86 optimized code used by game engines. .net still has its performance weaknesses when it comes to processing large data arrays.

I think a lot of games are built using engines which have ARM ports (i.e. for Nintendo Switch & phones). Therefore, ARM-optimized code paths will exist for them.

I'm not saying ARM is a good desktop gaming platform, today, but I just think there's not as much work needed for it to be competitive as some people seem to think.

 

[digitalgriffin]

I think a lot of games are built using engines which have ARM ports (i.e. for Nintendo Switch & phones). Therefore, ARM-optimized code paths will exist for them.

I'm not saying ARM is a good desktop gaming platform, today, but I just think there's not as much work needed for it to be competitive as some people seem to think.

You would need to re-release the game with arm optimized code. Plus the anti-piriting and cheat bots would have a field day with this. This is a no go for a niche company with a non standard version of ARM. But you would also have to run the ARM version of windows. (which is still hamstrung) There are plenty of system level calls for x86, that ARM needs a lot of hand holding for or simply aren't compatible.

 

[bit_user]

You would need to re-release the game with arm optimized code.

Yes! That's what I'm talking about - and I think I'm not alone, there. If ARM on the desktop took off, that's probably what we'd see.

While some JIT-based emulators are pretty good, I think the Win 11/ARM has only about 70% of native performance, IIRC. For ARM to really be a competitive gaming platform, it'd pretty much need native ports.

Plus the anti-piriting and cheat bots would have a field day with this.

How are they doing with games in Apple's Rosetta 2 or Win 11/ARM's x86 emulator?

This is a no go for a niche company with a non standard version of ARM.

There's no such thing as a "nonstandard version of ARM". ARM strictly defines ARMv8-A feature levels. The ARM ISA is licensed, and the terms of the license include that companies aren't allowed to implement their own proprietary ISA extensions.

 

[digitalgriffin]

There's no such thing as a "nonstandard version of ARM". ARM strictly defines ARMv8-A feature levels. The ARM ISA is licensed, and the terms of the license include that companies aren't allowed to implement their own proprietary ISA extensions.

Apples Rosetta manages about 70% to from what I understand. (This is average)

While the isa is the same, the implementation details can differ. That can also include things like cache size, branch predictors, memory subsystems, look ahead buffers and more.

 

[bit_user]

While the isa is the same, the implementation details can differ. That can also include things like cache size, branch predictors, memory subsystems, look ahead buffers and more.

Yes, CPU implementations can differ, but the ISA part (for ARM) is standard. That was my only point.

ARM is very rigid about this, because they don't want "balkanization" of their ecosystem or to have any unnecessary barriers between running code on one CPU vs. another of similar or greater ISA capability.

No less than Jim Keller have publicly complained that ARM wouldn't allow any special exceptions for him - not even just a couple instructions' worth. The end result was that Jim turned his back on ARM and went over to the RISC-V camp.