Chinese Zhaoxin announced plans to release the Kaisheng KH-40000, a general-purpose processor for the server market.

Zhaoxin is a fabless semiconductor company, created in 2013 as a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. The company creates x86 compatible CPUs. The processors are created mainly for the Chinese market, as the venture is an attempt to reduce the Chinese dependence on foreign technology.

Zhaoxin is already ofering two primary product lines. The KaiXian chips are designed for the consumer market, while the KaiSheng processors are tailored towards the server market. Zhaoxin's existing KaiXian KX-6000 and KaiSheng KH-30000 series are on the 16nm process node. They feature the same LuJiaZui microarchitecture, and sport up to eight cores and base clocks up to 2.7 GHz.

The new KH-40000 series will use the the 16nm process node, but Zhaoxin is promising to quadruple the core count from eight to 32 cores, use DDR4 RAM and a PCIe 3.0 interface.

In addition, Zhaoxin says it has started research and development for processors made using a 7nm process or even lower.

This processor will be the successor of the KX-6000 seriess, namely the KX-7000 series processors.

Current KaiXian KX-6000 processors are based on the LuJiaZui microarchitecture and produced with TSMC's 16nm manufacturing process. The chips max out at eight cores and feature base clocks up to 3 GHz. The upcoming KX-7000 chips are said to be produced on TSMC's 7nm process node. The 7nm KX-7000 parts are expected to come with a new iGPU (integrated graphics processing unit) that's compatible with DirectX 12, as well as support for the latest PCIe 4.0 interface and DDR5 RAM.