The processors are not only designed in countries orbiting the United States, but also in other parts of the world like Mother Russia, as semiconductors are too important a strategic piece for Americans to share their secrets. with their veteran enemy, which is not. does not mean that the new processors are not designed in Russia.
In any case, it must be taken into account that the chip designs in this country do not reach the technological level of large companies such as Intel, NVIDIA or AMD, which have the capacity to realize Full Custom designs where it and the manufacturing node go hand in hand, and they must also rely on elements already known and previously designed to develop their processors.
Baikal BE-S1000X, the Russian 48-core CPU
For some time now, ISA ARM has evolved from smartphones to the server market to stand up to Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC. We have known cases like Nuvia, Ampere, internal designs made in companies like Amazon and Alibaba, etc. In this case, we are going to talk about Baikal-S. A processor funded by the Russian state and developed by the Baikal company.
The name of the CPU is BE-S1000X and it consists of 48 ARM Cortex A75 cores at 2 GHz, but with the possibility of reaching the 2.5 GHz clock speed, all under one 120 watts TDP. This part was not developed by the Russian company, since it is a kernel designed by ARM Holdings and under license. In reality, very few companies today have the ability to build a processor core from scratch due to the enormous complexity involved, which is why NVIDIA’s attempt to buy ARM was so controversial.
Although ARM cores are not the only part of the BE-S1000X, but Baikal has developed a custom coprocessor that handles security and booting, based on ISA RISC-V. Let’s not forget that while ARM licenses supplement pieces of hardware other than ISA, RISC-V does not, so BE-S1000X engineers had to develop that part of the processor from scratch.
What are its performances?
Obviously, we will not be able to install this CPU in our PCs, but it will go on servers placed in strategic places, but the existence of the BE-S1000X allows Russia to be less dependent on the technology developed in the United States. .
According to the designers of the BE-S1000X, its performance is equivalent to that of an Intel Xeon Gold 6148 with a 16-core SkyLake architecture. They also compare it to an AMD EPYC 7351, also 16 cores and based on the first generation Zen architecture. Seen like this it doesn’t sound so impressive, however, that’s what we were saying at the start of this article, it is the distrust in the United States that forces the geopolitically rival countries to develop their own processors.
