Despite Western sanctions, Russia still manages to obtain computer equipment. Here, we are talking about a batch of 1000 in-house designed Baikal-S processors. To get an idea, we will remember that it is a CPU with 48 cores ARM !
Baikal-S: Russia manages to supply itself with processors!
It will not have escaped your notice that since February 2022, Russia has entered into conflict with Ukraine. This situation has generated a whole bunch of sanctions in all directions, the Westerners sanctioning the Russians and vice versa. However, when it comes to cutting-edge technology, the West leads the way. Here, the pressures of these sanctions have led the Baikal brand to bankruptcy, we learn ici (sourced by C-News.ru).
Nevertheless, if the company depended on TSMC to produce its first processors, today we learn that the country received a first batch of 1000 CPU Baikal-S. Ultimately, what raises questions here is the origin of such processors. However, we see two situations, either Russia turned to China for production, or the country used front companies to place orders from Western companies.
As for the processor itself, we learn (via ITHome) that this is an in-house design model. The latter has a total of 48 ARM Cortex-A75 cores, all engraved in 16 nm. Concerning its frequencies, it operates at a base frequency of 2 GHz with a turbo at 2.5 GHz. Here, the consumption is announced at 120W while the chip can manage up to 768 GB of RAM in DDR4-3200 ECC. With this, we find five interfaces PCIe 4.0 x16, one controller USB 2.0 and two 1 GbE network interfaces.
In terms of performance, obviously, we do not compete with the latest productions from Intel and AMD (which are no longer accessible to Russia). However, it is said that this model competes with a Xeon Gold 6148 (released in 2017), a 20-core model at 2.4 GHz or an Epyc 7351 in 16 cores at 2.9 GHz also dating from 2017. Finally, according to a roadmap dating back to 2021, Baikal hoped to produce 600,000 of these CPU per year by 2025. How can we say that this is compromised?
