Chinese chipmaker soon to launch a GPU that approximates the GeForce GTX 1080

China has been quietly developing CPUs and GPUs for years, but lately it has been trying to speed up existing projects without much tangible success. Still, from time to time, we hear about another small advance made by a Chinese company. Such is the case with Jingjia Micro, which is approaching the launch of a graphics card that could potentially come close to the performance of a GeForce GTX 1080.

So far, we've seen a lot more action in the CPU space from Chinese companies like Zhaoxin, who are trying to develop x86 processors that can catch up and eventually compete with those made by Intel and AMD. However, GPUs have not received the same attention that they have received. One notable exception is Jingjia Micro (also known as Jingjiawei), which started out as a military-civilian company developing and manufacturing military-grade electronic products. Nearly three years ago, the company said it was working on its own high-performance discrete graphics card after successfully launching China's first home GPU. According to a report from MyDrivers, Jingjia Micro is preparing to release not one, but two graphics cards. The first is an entry-level model called the JM9231 that will offer performance close to the level of a GeForce GTX 1050 or Radeon RX 560. The second, more ambitious, is the JM9271, which can supposedly keep up with a GeForce GTX 1080 or RX Vega 64 from AMD.

Digging deeper, the JM9231 will integrate 8GB of GDDR5 memory and deliver two teraflops of FP32 performance with a TDP of 150 watts, which would be an impressive feat for the Chinese company. As for the JM9271, it will come with 16 gigabytes of HBM memory and offer 8 teraflops of computing power at a TDP of 200 watts. With that said, Jingjia Micro explains that it is still in the early stages of development for the two graphics cards, which still need to go through further testing before the company can begin production testing. Efficiency is not a strong point of these, although the performance is somewhat promising if they are comparable, at least on paper, to the GPUs of several years ago that are still quite capable in the case of the GTX 1080. There is also no news compatible with DirectX or Vulkan API, so the JM9231 and JM9271 cards may never end up in a gaming PC. The only other prominent companies known to be working on GPUs are Huawei's subsidiary HiSilicon and Tianshu Zhixin Semiconductor, which are working on GPGPUs for the Asian server market.