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Liliputing reports
Most modern desktop and notebook computers ship with Intel or AMD processors and Windows or OS X software. A few companies are positioning products with ARM-based chips as desktop computers. But the Tavolga Terminal TB-T22BT(русский [1]) is something different.
This all-in-one desktop PC has a MIPS-based processor and runs Debian 8 Linux software.
The computer is made by Russian company T-Platforms, which also offers an SF-BT1 processor module for those that want to build their own hardware.
Both devices use a Baikal-T1 processor which is a 32-bit dual-core MIPS P5600 processor. Like the computers, the chip was designed in Russia, although it's based on work from Imagination Technologies (the company behind the MIPS architecture).
The all-in-one desktop features a 21.5 inch IPS display, support for up to 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory, and up to 64GB of flash storage. It has four USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 port, Gigabit Ethernet, and a fanless case for silent operation. There's also support for smart cards.
T-Platforms is positioning the TB-T22BT as a device that can either be used as a standalone computer with support for Linux-based apps such as LibreOffice and Firefox, or as a thin client system that you can use to connect to remote machines using remote desktop software.
[1] The translation dropdown menu did not work. Google translation
Previous: Russia Plans to Dump Some American CPUs for Homegrown Technology
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday March 07 2016, @01:24AM
I didn't click around to check for prices, but i wonder what the trust level is...
...can i use it with more security than the stuff we buy here?
Any Russian readers???
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday March 07 2016, @01:42AM
All of which can, and will, be checked for as soon as someone in a cyber security company gets their mits on one of these units.
tin foil hat moment aside, this sounds pretty cool
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Monday March 07 2016, @02:59AM
Errr...this is different from computers on sale here, from U.S. companies (mostly made in Asia), how? Sure you can still build your own desktop and boot it to whatever Linux distro you want.
You still have to worry about iffy boot loaders, systemD, and weird stuff in the CPU and HD from China manufacturers etc. Do you trust Kaspersky Labs? They're Russian.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday March 07 2016, @01:43AM
It's about $1000 currently (and rubble crashed recently by about 50%). Kind of ridiculous.
As per security, they plan to use it for government and other sensitive applications.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VDIdumbterminal on Monday March 07 2016, @02:07AM
Sounds like a steal for applications where you can't afford US backed backdoors.
I think we're seeing the next 'arms' race in terms of nation state security.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 07 2016, @05:24AM
The only real way to win is for someone to figure out how to fab/3dprint well-performing CPUs at home for cheap.
In a world where Moore's law in being declared dead (Netcraft confirms it), it's possible that open hobbyist hardware not made in some Chinese factory could catch up to where Intel, AMD, GlobalFoundries, etc. are. Although I think there is massive room for improvement with vertical stacking being a leading candidate to improve multithreaded CPU performance by 1,000 to 1,000,000 times (IBM or Intel may figure out how to deal with the heat), and other possible black swan approaches like Optalysys.
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(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday March 07 2016, @09:18AM
Yes, this could be the future. These homebrew chips wouldn't even need to be as fast as the chips we are currently using. Because they would be cheap, you'd be able to have lots of them doing discrete tasks - You could run a small personal webserver or FTP server quite happily on chips with a hundredth the capacity we enjoy now. Your home automation wouldn't need a big chip, you could get by on a clunky homebrew cpu no quicker than a 386. What do you really need for your media centre? Especially if you split the work across it into multiple systems, ie a file server and viewing boxen.
For gaming and serious work you'd probably need to buy a "real" system, but for a lot of the mundane computing you might be able to print your own. The diversity afforded by this open-source hardware should in theory help keep things secure, because there would no longer be such a monoculture in hardware or software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @01:26PM
Your home automation wouldn't need a big chip, you could get by on a clunky homebrew cpu no quicker than a 386
Right... So you want a 1um processor with about 275k transistors? And how are you going to manufacture it now along with required support chips? And then who is going to make all the software to run on those super expensive 1-off chips?
Think before talking. The only reason why can buy a $5 ARM processor that outperforms the "clunky 386" is because someone invested BILLIONS into making BILLIONS of chips. And probably even more was invested into making stuff work for those things. If you only want to make "clunky" chips, then expect to only spend a few hundred millions on your home fab to make your one chip that does nothing.
there would no longer be such a monoculture in ... software
So, when can we start to see you volunteering to make new software?
Also, if you haven't noticed, there is not exactly a monoculture in software.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday March 07 2016, @04:01PM
In 10 or 20 years we can expect home fabbing to be very sophisticated, working in multiple materials, at surprisingly small scales and with a combination of methods not limited to the simple pooping / cutting technologies we see now. Different parts of a project will be built (pooped, molded, etched, cut, grown) independently according to different methods, and then assembled all in one box. Also, alternative logic platforms (biological circuits, photonic circuits) may be more amenable to home fabbing than our current silicon.
Technology is moving forward incredibly quickly. Computers & the internet enabled an exponential increase in advancement by connecting so many people and allowing them to build upon one another's work, by virtue of being able to make unlimited copies of information at very low cost. 3D printing threatens to do something similar with physical things: When you hit the point that a printer can print another printer, the price of the things that can be printed will go down alarmingly (not all things will be printable, and obviously material costs will still apply). When we reach that point the technology will begin to improve itself exponentially, just like the internet did. How much of the modern internet is built on work that was in the first place enabled by the advent of the internet? It will be the same for 3D printers: Some team in Berlin will figure out how to print a crude chip, just for the hell of it. Some kid in Botswana will look at it and suggest a method to increase the transistor density by 2%. Someone in Sao Paolo builds a C compiler for it. The Botswana kid publishes another small speed increase, allowing a robotics hobbyist in Maine to build a simple programmable robot for under 50cents. A robot enthusiast in Nanking finds this useful, but wants more memory, so finds a way to build implement that and publishes it... Before you know it you've got real computers doing real work, all available to download and print for little more than the cost of the materials. If you could go back 40 years and describe the growth of today's internet to someone, it would sound as science fiction as what I've just described to you.
As for software... More people are getting more educated than ever. The open source movement will grow, even if it's only in proportion with population growth and the enfranchisement of large parts of the third world. More and more kids all over the world are growing up with programming being taught at the earliest levels of education. More and more people have access to computers and the internet. You don't think that in 10 or twenty years there will be more hobbyist programmers than ever before? Even the most obscure, esoteric projects will be able to find contributors because the pool of contributors will be that much bigger. Eventually 3D printing will bring about an explosion in hardware choices, just as the internet did for software. And for each new hardware platform that looks even vaguely interesting to a tiny proportion of those programmers, software will appear.
Monoculture: At present your average home or business user has a viable choice between 3 families of operating system, and 2 or 3 families of chips. Granted, it's not technically a monoculture but it doesn't offer a huge amount of diversity, which makes life that bit easier for people trying to profit from attacking those systems. Today one well crafted exploit can target a massive percentage of the world's PCs. I'm not saying that every user will custom design their own chips and software and every piece of hardware will be as unique as a snowflake, I'm saying that you might have a few dozen chip platforms to choose from, and a few dozen viable operating systems. Most will be open source. Each will have its own strengths and weaknesses, none will be invulnerable, but it make be a lot more work for anyone aiming to pwn most or all of the systems out there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @11:03AM
Perhaps some good news in this direction, recently announced:
We are happy to share our FREE and OPEN [DESIGN] microprocessor system, PULPino! [pulp-platform.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday March 07 2016, @08:02PM
I don't really think vertical stacking will be the next big step. The easy parts have already been done. What I expect is merging light-pipes onto the chips. Light travels faster than electricity, so a larger chip can be as fast as a smaller purely electrical chip. This may go hand in hand with changing off from a silicon substrate, but perhaps not, as there's recently been reported progress in adding phtonic processes directly onto silicon. Eventually we *will* need to go more 3-D for better chips, but I don't think that'll be the next major step (and it's already happening to a minor extent, and will continute to).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday March 07 2016, @06:26AM
Perhaps... come to think about it, if Russians backdoored it (which is unlikely) they would not care, while if the US finds something, it would probably leave a little guy alone to protect the exploit. It'd be smart for Russians to dump it on the market for cheap though.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Monday March 07 2016, @01:50AM
I'd just assume its at least as compromised as anything sold in the States.
I imagine most of the components come from China.
So even if you put your own OS on it and assume any supplied drivers and the controllers are compromised on delivery, if not from the Russian's then from the Chinese.
You have a chance of detecting some call-home compromise if you put something upstream of it and look for connections that you can't explain, and log them all.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @05:15AM
(Score: 1, Troll) by turgid on Monday March 07 2016, @08:43AM
It is completely impervious to Nazis and homosexuals. And homosexual Nazis.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @01:32AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @01:14PM
Replace it with antiX
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 07 2016, @02:04AM
But it looks like a pretty good concept, I hope it continues, and improves.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 07 2016, @05:26AM
Couldn't you just install a different distro or BSD [wikipedia.org]?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Arik on Monday March 07 2016, @10:41AM
If it came with a distro I would use that would make me more confident. But prior to Debian 8 it was a good distro, hopefully it's not so far gone so quickly.
Just too much hopefully in there for me to pay premium for hardware, though, don't you see? Entirely too much maybe. For that price and that performance I can get a system certified to worth with Slack and OBSD and not have to wonder if I'm going to get screwed.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by cpghost on Monday March 07 2016, @02:20AM
While a MIPS P5600 is nice, a 64-bit 8 core OpenSPARC T2 [oracle.com] would've been much more nicer. I'm missing those SPARC-based workstations, and I'm willing to buy a SPARC-powered PC/Laptop with modern RAM and peripherals any day, even from an Russian manufacturer.
Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dltaylor on Monday March 07 2016, @07:43AM
Personally, having used, and programmed for, just about every CPU core out there, since I can't have an 88K, I think I'd rather have a MIPS.
8 ins/outs/local/global is just too arbitrary for my taste; pass what you need, preferably in register, and have loads of "local" that the compiler decides need to be saved/restored.
Back when both the 88K and 32-bit SPARC were current, the 88K at 25 MHz kicked the ass of a 75 MHz SPARC.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday March 07 2016, @12:36PM
Back when both the 88K and 32-bit SPARC were current, the 88K at 25 MHz kicked the ass of a 75 MHz SPARC.
The SPARC initially had a hugely inefficient software-managed TLB. It was common to spend 50% of total CPU time in the TLB miss handler. This was improved a lot in later versions. I'm not sure how bad the 88K was (also a software-managed TLB, as are most MIPS chips, but nowhere near as bad as the early SPARCs), but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the performance difference came from this.
It's also worth noting that the compiler can use any of the 8 out registers as temporaries (not preserved across calls, but lots of register assignments don't need to be) and any of the 8 in values that are not in use as saved registers. That gives you quite a lot of space - it's pretty rare for register starvation to be a problem on SPARC.
The S in SPARC stands for scalable, because different implementations are allowed to have different numbers of register windows. This ranges from 2-9 in implementations that I've seen. With small numbers, the fact that the overflow routine has to spill values even if there's nothing really valuable in them can make things a lot worse than if you have a more conventional calling convention, but with a larger number then the elimination of stack spills in the common case can be a fairly big win.
SPARC is also a lot less likely to suffer from return-oriented programming vulnerabilities. The link register is never spilled to the main stack (it's spilled to the space where you spill register windows if you run out of hardware register windows), so no stack buffer overflow can allow overwriting the return address on SPARC.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by bitstream on Monday March 07 2016, @08:55AM
Specification: [baikalelectronics.com]
* 2 x core P5600 MIPS 32 r5 kernels, operational frequency up to 1.2 GHz
* Cache L2 1 MByte
* Memory controller DDR3-1600 (max 12 800 MByte/s)
* Power consumption below 5 W
* Chip in 28 nm process
* Integrated interfaces:
1 port: 10 Gbit/s Ethernet
2 ports: 1 Gbit/s Ethernet
PCI-e Gen.3 controller
2 ports: SATA 3.0
USB 2.0
Tavolga terminal tp22bt [t-platforms.ru]:
* Graphics card - SM750, 16 MB video memory
* Memory 2 - 8 GByte DDR3
* Sound codec PCM2912A
* 4 x USB 2.0, 1 x PS/2, smart card, SD / SDHC / SDXC / MMC / MS, 3.5 mm stereo
* 2 x 1 Gbit/s wired Ethernet or wired+SFP
No price given so perhaps it's priceless! :P
It seems capable but how would it compare to a standard Intel x86-computer in the GHz range? And regarding security. It's not system software one should perhaps worry about. But nefarious chip features which you can't debug in a normal way. Some nefarious bit string sent could activate all kinds of shit or just make the harddisc controller send bad code.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 07 2016, @09:15AM
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
--
Obi-Wan Kenobi feels the impact of TFA on Microsoft.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday March 07 2016, @09:27AM
Windows NT 3.51 used to run on MIPS. (And Alpha and PowerPC...)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @01:29PM
If it had 32GB ram