It is said to be the first PC motherboard with a soldered-on processor that is produced entirely in China: the GM7-2602-02 in Mini-ITX format from Gitstar. At least that’s what they report Chinese media like IT Homewith reference to the Chinese shop platform JD.com.
Advertisement
Depending on the definition, however, not all technology is of Chinese origin: the heart is the ARM processor Phytium D2000. Although the Chinese chip contract manufacturer SMIC probably produces it with 14 nanometer structures, the underlying ARM architecture comes from the West.
Little performance
The Phytium D2000 uses eight FTC663 CPU cores and achieves clock frequencies of 2.3 GHz. The website Chips and Cheese has already taken a closer look at the processor in 2022 and suspects that the FTC663 cores are derived from Cortex-A72. ARM introduced the latter design in 2015.
The Phytium D2000 is said to be downright lame due, among other things, to small caches and poor jump prediction. The old Intel quad-core Core i5-6600K ran away from it in numerous benchmarks.
Old and few connections
Meanwhile, the rest of the platform also seems outdated: there are 16 PCI Express 3.0 lanes for a graphics card and apparently only a single PCIe 3.0 lane for an M.2 SSD. That’s enough for SSD transfer rates of just under one gigabyte per second. Just two USB ports transmit 5 Gbit/s (USB 3.2 Gen 1, previously called USB 3.0). Two front ports are enough for four USB 3.2 Gen 1 on the housing.
The two RAM slots accommodate SO-DIMMs with DDR4-2400 speed – connected via two memory channels (dual channel). There is no GPU in the D2000 processor. The HDMI and VGA ports are instead connected to the Phytium X100 chipset with integrated mini-GPU.
Connections of the GM7-2602-02 on the back, including only two USB.
(Image: Gitstar)
The D2000 processor consumes up to 40 watts, the chipset an additional 15 watts – a high electrical power consumption for the performance and range of functions. The power is supplied via a DC connection, like the one used by many notebooks.
The two Linux operating systems Ubuntu and Kylin should run on the platform.
Gitstar is asking 4880 yuan for the GM7-2602-02. This corresponds to around 630 euros.
(mma)