Despite Western sanctions, Russia is still managing to obtain computer hardware. In this case, we’re talking about a batch of 1,000 home-grown Baikal-S processors. To give you an idea, this is a CPU with 48 ARM cores!
Baikal-S: Russia manages to get its processor supply!
It will not have escaped your attention that since February 2022, Russia has been in conflict with Ukraine. This situation has generated a whole raft of sanctions in all directions, with the West sanctioning the Russians and vice versa. However, when it comes to cutting-edge technologies, the West leads the way. Here, the pressures of these sanctions have driven the Baikal brand into bankruptcy, we learnt here (sourced by C-News.ru).
Nevertheless, while the company depended on TSMC to produce its first processors, we now learn that the country has received its first batch of 1,000 Baikal-S CPUs. Ultimately, the question here is where such processors come from. Nevertheless, we can see two situations: either Russia has turned to China for production, or the country has used front companies to place orders with Western firms.
As for the processor itself, we learn (via ITHome) that this is a home-grown model. It has a total of 48 ARM Cortex-A75 cores, all etched in 16nm. In terms of frequency, it operates at a base frequency of 2 GHz with a turbo at 2.5 GHz. Power consumption is rated at 120W, while the chip can manage up to 768 GB of DDR4-3200 ECC RAM. Alongside this are five PCIe 4.0 x16 interfaces, a USB 2.0 controller and two 1 GbE network interfaces.
In terms of performance, of course, it can’t compete with the latest products from Intel and AMD (which are no longer available in Russia). However, this model is said to rival a Xeon Gold 6148 (released in 2017), a model with 20 cores at 2.4 GHz or an Epyc 7351 with 16 cores at 2.9 GHz also dating from 2017. Finally, according to a roadmap dating from 2021, Baikal hoped to produce 600,000 of these CPUs per year by 2025. How can we say that this is compromised?
