First gaming PC motherboard made entirely with China tech comes with integrated homegrown CPU — $700 buys the claimed world's first totally China-made board
Domestic CPUs need domestic boards.
Computer component manufacturer Beijing Jite Intelligent Technology reckons it has made the first motherboard manufactured entirely in China using Chinese technology (via ITHome). The GM7-2602-02 motherboard uses the standard Mini-ITX form factor and comes with a Chinese-developed Arm CPU. If this motherboard is the real deal, then it's another step China has successfully taken to advance its native manufacturing capabilities.
The Mini-ITX motherboard appears to be mostly mainstream. It has an M.2 slot, a 16x PCIe slot, and rear I/O including VGA, HDMI, audio jacks, two Ethernet ports, and two USB 3.0 ports. What isn't quite so normal is its two SODIMM DDR4 memory slots and an included CPU that seems to be soldered, not socketed. This makes the GM7-2602-02 motherboard more akin to one you might find in a NUC or Mini PC, except for the inclusion of the 16x PCIe slot.
The CPU is a Feiteng D2000 with eight cores, which is developed and made in China, but uses the Arm architecture. The four-core version of this CPU is apparently capable of gaming, which implies the GM7-2602-02 should be just as capable, especially as it can also take a discrete graphics card. At this point, it seems it may be possible to make a full, Chinese-domestic gaming PC using this motherboard and a graphics card from Moore Threads.
Of course, that's all assuming this motherboard is actually completely made in China. Although there's nothing in particular to suggest that Beijing Jite Intelligent Technology is stretching the truth, many Chinese companies have made similar claims in the past while relying on foreign technology. The company's website even has a list of products predating the GM7-2602-02 it describes as domestic, but claims the GM7-2602-02 is the first domestically produced motherboard. It's just not entirely clear what "domestic" actually means.
That being said, motherboards aren't exactly the most complicated computer components to make. China already can make its own CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs, so it wouldn't be too far-fetched if motherboards were added to the list. Yet it's also a crucial component for the country's emerging semiconductor industry, as every computer needs a motherboard, and although the GM7-2602-02 is far from cutting-edge, it nevertheless is ostensibly natively made.
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Matthew Connatser is a freelancing writer for Tom's Hardware US. He writes articles about CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and computers in general.
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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.Reply
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.Reply
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.Reply -
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.Reply
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digitalgriffin
It's arm. 99% of games aren't optimized for ARM. Remember what a failure transmeta was? (Sorry Linus T.)Alvar Miles Udell said: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.
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Alvar "Miles" Udell
Which is true, BUT if they can create an efficient x86 translation layer, like Apple did, then that's not an issue.digitalgriffin said:It's arm. 99% of games aren't optimized for ARM. Remember what a failure transmeta was? (Sorry Linus T.) -
MobileJAD
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.usertests said: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". -
bit_user
Uh, so following the links from the article, the cores are described as follows:digitalgriffin said:Good for them.
"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.Alvar Miles Udell said: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)
Smartphones are ARM-based - as is Nintendo Switch. Are you saying there are no games for them, or that they're not optimized?digitalgriffin said:It's arm. 99% of games aren't optimized for ARM. Remember what a failure transmeta was? (Sorry Linus T.)