[6] VIA holds a x86 license which allows its subsidiaries to produce compatible microprocessors; this allows Zhaoxin to develop x86 computer chips.

[5] The architecture of the initial ZX family of processors is a continuation of VIA's Centaur Technology x86-64 Isaiah design.

[9] The ZX-B is identical to the ZX-A, except that it is manufactured by Shanghai Huali Microelectronics Corporation (HLMC) .

Zhaoxin came to the attention of the North American and European technology press when, in late 2017 and early 2018, it launched the ZX-D processor and revealed plans for future products.

It is also a departure from earlier microarchitectures, such as ZhangJiang, which were a lightly modified version of a VIA Technologies (Centaur) architecture.

[10][8] Changes implemented in the ZX-D included the integration of a northbridge, like in modern x86 designs, as well as the addition of Chinese cryptographic functions.

The successor to the ZX-D, the KX-6000 system on a chip (also called ZX-E), was demonstrated to the press in September 2018.

[17] Zhaoxin was itself reported as saying that the KX-7000 reached the same level of performance as the seventh-generation Intel Core i5-7400 (which was launched in 2017).

[14] The Zhaoxin ZX-C+ 4701 CPU was reviewed in 2020, and showed significantly worse performance against older Intel (i5 2500K) and AMD (Athlon 3000G) processors.