SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Announced shortly after the 1 year anniversary of the first revelations by Eric Snowden that American spy agencies have their fingers in everything, the Russian government will be funding a project to build a custom microprocessor. Codenamed Baikal (after the lake with Earth's largest volume of fresh water), it will be built around an ARM Cortex A57, a 64-bit architecture running at 2GHz. No core count or other details are available. First deliveries are expected in 2015.
The ARM architecture aligns with Vladimir Putin's goal, announced in 2010, to move all government computers onto Linux. It also comes in the wake of another large country's recent barring of some American technology in favor of a homegrown Linux distro.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Russia Plans to Dump Some American CPUs for Homegrown Technology
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 33 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
And tomorrow will be like today, only more so.
-- Isaiah 56:12, New Standard Version
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday June 22 2014, @08:28PM
Some possible outcomes:
* Intel and AMD takes a financial hit
* Some agencies will feel increased less than friendly relationship
* x86 software base may be less viable, unless smartphones and appliances already did away with that
* UEFI hostilities may be done away with
* Cheaper CPUs may be had from Russia
* ARM based desktop computing will influence western markets
Does project Baikal license the core officially from ARM?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22 2014, @08:58PM
Other possible outcome:
Nothing happens at all.
China went full-retard in the "build our own CPU" trend back in the 1990's, resulting [geek.com] in a 260MHz processor (in 2002!) that was actually slower than most 10-year old 486's. The remnants of that project are called Loongson, and it is garbage.
They also went full-retard on a Linux distribution [wikipedia.org] in the early 2000's, even going so far as to ban Microsoft products for a few years (yes, last month's press release wasn't the first time China did this). Once RedHat changed their policy on distributions leeching from their RPM sources, Red Flag Linux went belly-up, because the Chinese Academy of Sciences couldn't keep up with the blistering pace of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development.
That was China's attempt. They actually have infrastructure, money, and the fab designs of ARM and AMD64 processors.
Russia has a smaller GDP than France. Big country, shit economy. This is going nowhere.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Lagg on Sunday June 22 2014, @09:13PM
Phew, a realistic take on this. Even from an AC (but I bet you're registered here and just don't want the karma loss. Don't blame you). Yeah this is one of those silly saber rattling situations and Putin as usual thinking he has a pedestal to stand on and taking advantage of the current disgust towards the US government. Which is hilarious coming from the head of the Russian government. They might as well also grow PCB materials for fear that there might be an evil 'murikan bug in it too. Granted and despite it being way behind, russia did have its own PCs (for some value of "its own") and a fledgling indie video game/homebrew community that were mildly successful for a while even before the internet. So who knows. Maybe we'll get some designs that let us build our own 120MHz machines out of some breadboard and IDE wires. These are russians after all. They were pretty good with that kind of hacking.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Sunday June 22 2014, @09:27PM
Russia seems to have very clever people but very bad support to get their ideas into real products. Guess we just have to see what hapends. As for China, perhaps Loongson worked as a negotiation tool?
As for the money if the Russian GDP is 2 029 812 million USD. The cost of a new fab is like 1/1000:th of the economy as a whole. I'm sure they can do something. A cheaper alternative is to design the CPU them self and then contract the fabrication to China. Upon return the chips are inspected for discrepancies. It is possible however to manipulate the layers so it looks right but ain't because some connections are or aren't properly done. Or just doped with different types of atoms.
One aspect is that it's easy to copy. But if innovation is lacking it will be a constant playing of the catch up game.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Monday June 23 2014, @09:28AM
"Russia has a smaller GDP than France."
Such comparisons are meaningless nowadays, especially when some western countries decide to introduce "estimated revenue from prostitution and drug trafficking" as part of their GDP.