A mysterious GPU from China has been spotted in the Geekbench online results browser. The benchmarking app was used to run tests on a system that appears to be mostly based on technology from Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Company. It has a Zhaoxin KaiXian CPU, Zhaoxin motherboard, and a “Zhaoxin Glenfly GPU.” That last one is a new name.
Twitter’s Benchleaks surfaced this OpenCL result, which can give some indication of GPU performance. We wouldn’t put to much weight on the current score, however, as 579 for Geekbench OpenCL is quite terrible. For comparison, even the lowly GTX 1650 scores around 38,000, while an RTX 3070 scores in the 135,000 range.
The Chinese PC system sounds modern and capable enough on first impressions. Its CPU has 8C/8T and runs at approximately 2.7 GHz and is accompanied by a modest 8GB of DDR4 RAM. It has a discrete GPU called the Glenfly Arise 1020, with 24 compute units (even though that’s an AMD GPU term) and 2GB of VRAM. These figures don’t match up very well with the poor OpenCL score in Geekbench 5.
The Benchleaks comparison with an RTX 3070 seems pretty nonsensical, so we thought we would look through the full table of OpenCL scores maintained by Geekbench. One has to scroll down the page a long way to see scores in the 579 region. The only GPUs in this area of the table are vintage AMD iGPUs like the Radeon HD 6480G and Radeon HD 6410D from 2011. You can also find Arm-designed mobile GPUs like the Mali-G52 from 2018, and the Mali-T860 from 2016.
Better Contemporary Comparisons
Those old low-end iGPUs and Arm GPUs might not be very good comparisons either, for people living in 2022 and wondering about the Zhaoxin Glenfly Arise 1020 GPU’s performance compared to contemporary PCs. So, looking at something more modern and relatable to PC enthusiasts, we see that the Zhaoxin GPU is about 20x slower than the AMD Radeon Vega 11 graphics, which were integrated into the AMD Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 5 3400G APUs. If that isn’t a mainstream enough reference, the legendary GeForce GTX 1060 6GB was about 60 times faster than the Zhaoxin Glenfly Arise 1020 GPU in these tests.
Is the Zhaoxin Glenfly Arise 1020 GPU an Entry Level Member of the Family?
Of course, the “Glenfly Arise 1020” GPU might not be Zhaoxin’s best option. The ‘1020’ could be a low-power minimum spec member of the GPU family. Last June we reported on some information and images which provided some insight into a Zhaoxin GlenFly discrete GPU at sub-75W that was spotted running the Unigine Heaven benchmark (a 2009 DX11 test). We don’t know if that was the same GPU as the one in the Geekbench OpenCL tests, but it appeared to be more capable.
In the Unigine Heaven tests shared last year, the Chinese graphics card managed 32fps on an FHD monitor. Unfortunately, we don’t know the benchmark quality settings used, or if it was upscaling to 1080p or running at native resolution.
A perhaps more likely problem is that OpenCL testing with Geekbench can be highly variable, particularly with early drivers. Using it to gauge GPU performance can lead to very skewed results, even with comparisons between GPUs using the same architecture. Properly tuned drivers might boost performance an order of magnitude or more, but without direct access to the hardware and drivers, this is all we have for now. We’ll withhold any final judgement until hardware and drivers become publicly available, and consider this early look more of a proof of existence than a reliable measurement of potential performance.