Former Co-Owner of Russia's Baikal Microelectronics Goes Bankrupt:
T-Platforms, a Russian company that once planned to build an exascale supercomputer and homegrown CPUs, was declared bankrupt this week as the cost of the company's assets was lower than its obligations. T-Platforms was one of a few companies in Russia that could build world-class high-performance supercomputers. The main reasons for the bankruptcy are not sanctions by Western countries but rather Russia's attempt to replace Western technologies with its own.
T-Platforms was established in 2002 to build servers and supercomputers that would be competitive against offerings from the likes of IBM and HP. Over the years, T-Platforms developed some of Russia's highest-performing supercomputers based on AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon, and Nvidia Tesla processors. For example, the company's Lomonosov supercomputer, based on 33,072 CPUs, was ranked the No. 18 most potent machine in the world and the No. 3 supercomputer in Europe.
[...] Baikal Microelectronics secured government subsidies to speed up the development of homebrew processors and servers. However, while Baikal Microelectronics has managed to design several Arm and MIPS-based processors, whereas T-Platforms started to sell some of its new servers in Russia, they failed to deliver their products on time. As a result, the Russian Ministry of Trade sued Baikal in 2019. Meanwhile, the chief executive officer of T-Platforms was arrested in March 2019 as his company failed to deliver about 9,000 Baikal-based PCs to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It is when the company started to fire personnel and fold its operations.
Related Stories
Russian Baikal 48-Core CPU Die Shots, Benchmarks Emerge
Twitter user Fritzchens Fritz has managed to obtain a sample of Baikal Electronics' 48-core BE-S1000 server-grade system-on-chip (SoC) and throw it under an infrared microscope to reveal its internals. In addition, some benchmark results of the SoC have surfaced.
Baikal Electronics has developed several system-on-chips for different devices to replace x86 processors from PCs and various compute appliances made in Russia. However, the pinnacle of the company's design prowess should have been its BE-S1000 server-grade SoC with 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores, which the company managed to tape out and produce the first sample using TSMC's 16FFC fabrication technology, but which will never be released commercially due to sanctions against Russia for its invasion in Ukraine.
Also at TechPowerUp.
Previously:
TSMC Ships First Batch of Baikal BE-M1000 ARM CPUs
UK Sanctions Russian Microprocessor Makers, Banning Them From ARM
BITBLAZE Titan BM15 Arm Linux Laptop Features Russian Baikal-M1 Processor
Former Co-Owner of Russia's Baikal Microelectronics Goes Bankrupt
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday October 06 2022, @03:48AM (3 children)
if your deliveries to government agencies are late, the government will sue you... and arrest your CEO.
Imagine this approach being applied to SLS...
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:15AM (1 child)
The funny thing about this on-paper-seems-appropriate reaction to a failure to deliver on a contract - isn't a great incentivisation towards growing your business. The only people who will be bidding for contracts will be ones who are so big that they've already got their claws in the corrupt government (a.k.a. "too big to fail" in other countries). And they're just as likely to be late, they'll just be big enough to get away with it. So this doesn't solve the late delivery problem, all it does is exascerbate the corporate-government corruption problem.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2022, @02:17PM
Interesting. First verbalize a noun:
incentive -> incentivise
Then nounify it back:
iincentivise -> ncentivisation
Where can I learn to do this?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday October 06 2022, @10:50AM
This is Russia, the text should read:
(Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:09AM
Lomonosov-2 entered at 23rd
I'm not saying supercomputers are easy, but both were off-the-shelf intel chips connected with off-the-shelf infiniband running off-the-shelf linux and an off-the-shelf gnu toolchain - much like most of the rest of the world, so it's also not a criticism. It requires effort and $$$ more than it requires any great spark of inventiveness. (Cue inspiration/perspiration quote.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves