The new design spreads 96 cores across 12 compute chiplets tied together with a hefty IO die, and thanks to the firm’s new ZPI 5.0 interconnect, dual and quad-socket systems can now hit 384 cores on a single board.

Clock speeds land at 2.0 GHz base with a 3.0 GHz boost, and the chips boast a total of 384 MB of cache. Zhaoxin claims a 30 per cent IPC uplift over its earlier architecture, which, if true, would mark its most ambitious generational jump yet. With support for 12-channel DDR5 ECC memory and 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes, the KH-50000 also drags Zhaoxin’s IO capabilities into the modern era.

The package itself will look familiar to anyone who has seen AMD’s EPYC “Bergamo” parts. From the integrated heat spreader to the die layout, Zhaoxin appears to have taken heavy inspiration from its Western rivals. Zhaoxin has done this before with its consumer-grade KX-7000 series bears more than a passing resemblance to Intel’s 12th-gen Core family.

Compared with the outgoing KH-4000, the KH-50000 ramps up everything dramatically, tripling the core count from 32 to 96, raising peak clocks from 2.5 GHz to 3.0 GHz, expanding cache from 64 MB to 384 MB, and moving from DDR4 to DDR5 with four additional memory channels.

PCIe support has jumped from 4.0 to 5.0, while the older ZPI 3.0 interconnect has been replaced with ZPI 5.0, promising greater bandwidth and lower latency across multiple sockets.

Zhaoxin also revealed the KX-7000N, an updated consumer CPU that integrates a dedicated NPU for AI workloads. The company hinted at an even more advanced desktop lineup coming later, with additional cores, PCIe 5.0 support, and a new heterogeneous NPU architecture aimed squarely at the so-called “AI PC” market.

For Beijing, the KH-50000 is a statement that China can produce high-core-count silicon with competitive features without having to rely on American or Taiwanese fabs. Whether Zhaoxin’s latest effort is genuinely a performance rival to AMD and Intel or simply an expensive domestic substitute will be determined when independent benchmarks arrive.