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Russia Wants To Replace US Computer Chips With Local Processors
An anonymous reader writes with this news from Tass: Russia's Industry and Trade Ministry plans to replace U.S. microchips (Intel and AMD), used in government's computers, with domestically-produced micro Baikal processors in a project worth dozens of millions of dollars, business daily Kommersant reported Thursday. The article is fairly thin, but does add a bit more detail: "The Baikal micro processor will be designed by a unit of T-Platforms, a producer of supercomputers, next year, with support from state defense conglomerate Rostec and co-financing by state-run technological giant Rosnano.
The first products will be Baikal M and M/S chips, designed on the basis of 64-bit nucleus Cortex A-57 made by UK company ARM, with frequency of 2 gigahertz for personal computers and micro servers."
It will be interesting to see how good these chips are. Potentially they could provide a cheap alternative for datacentres
Been saying this for years now since the earliest reports of NSA spying and the cooperation of technology companies came out. Most people kept saying it was nonsense that global trust in US technology can never be lost if only because ours is "the best" and is too expensive to replace. Seems to me that's not a deciding factor these days. The bad behaving US government is causing real harm to business now. As soon as business begins to realize how toxic that relationship is, they will stop doing it. But then again, we still have lots of companies trying to send (outsource) tech to China... China who has a long history of taking the tech and spinning it off on their own. Hoy myopic can they be?
Did you read the article? The processors are based on ARM.
Is it based on publicly released info from Snowden or something more severe that they now know from him that the public don't. Or could it be general retaliation for the NSA's actions designed to hit US companies pockets...
Why not pick up the Loongson project from the chinese? Although I agree the ARM codeset seems very viable in the near future, MIPS is quite well known and the project seems to be stalling...
Russia probably has a market for non-US chips as well: it won't be surprising to see these in China or North Korea soon.
Plus, they probably will be designed in SI units rather than inches.
But won't they get the ARM source code in verilog (or VHDL), so they can spot any backdoors?
Are they? 99.9999% of governments do not understand their infrastructure security model revolving about using foreign hardware and processors is not a very bright idea.
During the Soviet Union, all they could do was "clone" a PDP-11 chip with an early version of a hardware bug that was later rectified by DEC
Russia has been trying to build a "Silicon Valley" outside of Moscow and to date is pretty much a dismal failure.
One really needs freedom of thought to innovate and to be bleeding edge. Russia has been sliding back into old ways, and the Soviet Bureaucracy mentality and fear of the state are very much at full strength -- under such conditions I do not see this progressing at all. They will have to fall back on stealing foreign technology and replicating it.
No matter how many announcements and throwing of cash at the problem (plus rampant corruption) they will not make any breakthrus.
I expect them to be as fully reliable as the Russian space program.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
They are one badly planned invasion away from having a large embargo slapped against them. It is in their own best interests to not be dependent on other countries for critical products. The bigger question is why did they wait so long to try to develop this kind of talent. The less dependent they are on other countries the easier it is for them to continue to be a bad actor.
They're not doing this.
That might not be a bad target. The Russian space program has a history of reliable but fairly conservative designs, e.g. the Soyuz has a solid multi-decade track record. Versus the American space program, which goes for more cutting-edge stuff like the Space Shuttle, but has more reliability problems.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is logical. They have already replaced Windows with ReactOS in their military systems, according to publicly available photos. Googling for reactos russia" also reveals that the government likely funds the development.
Better than revolving their economy around selling things they can find in other people's ground, eh, America?
Seriously, though, Russia's biggest mistake in the past 100 years was Khrushchev's decision to pursue a mission of copying the West rather than developing independently of the West. Lenin was a genius and Stalin was pure evil, but they (especially Stalin) were technocratically brilliant.
Probably not. Just because you have the VHDL source of something means zilch.
See the "FOSS OpenSSL" thing. You need to inspect and mathematically prove correctness.
That means it would be the correct approach to use a Russian design in the first place.
Vladimir is not a computer guy...
Where can I get these Russian replacements? I don't want the NSA spying on me through the back doors that are certainly designed into all AMD and Intel processors.
NSA already has access to all vPro machines by their own admission, so who's to say that something like vPro (if not vPro itself) is baked into all CPUs?
The article says they're doing this on desktops and servers (it implies ALL government desktops and servers, but we will disregard that silliness). So the plan is to replace x86/64 Intel and AMD chips with Russian ARM chips. For desktops and servers. Presumably desktops running Windows, an operating system which does not support ARM (never mind all their 15-year-old custom Windows applications). This is a daring plan! Lesser men like you and I wouldn't have had the nerve to equip our own bureaucracy with nonfunctional computers, but that is the brilliance of Poutine!
The Soyuz had two loss of crew accidents in 120 flights. And ten more mission failures.
Shuttle had two loss of crew accidents in 135 flights. And no extra mission failures.
I fail to see the reliability advantage of the Soyuz.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The micro processes you!!
This is something I haven't understood. Some Russian guy develops a block puzzle game on a Russian clone of a PDP-11, and this clone is the only reason the world has heard of the Electronika brand. Yet he goes lawsuit happy on anyone who clones his game.
If security for Russian govenrnment computers were my responsibility, I'd be far more concerned about the attack surface being exposed by all the crap software running on top of that processor, rather than the processor itself. Anyway, ARM is a licensed design, not domestic (unless they're planning on engineering a clean-room version for themselves?)
I suppose that chipmaking is a nice thing to have domestically, in case the shit hits the fan, but I suppose if I were serious about increasing cybersecurity, I'd be looking at the systems being run within govenrnment and contractors, make as much of it Open Source as possible (or at the very least, buy source licenses), and then continually audit and patch the crap out of everything. It's hard, boring, unsexy work, and in this case, it doesn't produce cool headlines for the political class, so we get this story instead.
This is what you get when you have morons running your government.
Who is going to slap an embargo on them? Not the UN, Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council. I can't imagine China would vote for that either.
What percentage of processors are made in (mainland) China?
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
TFS says "Russia's Industry and Trade Ministry plans to replace U.S. microchips (Intel and AMD), used in government's computers, with domestically-produced micro Baikal processors." They haven't done it or even started to do it yet.
I'm not saying they don't have reason to. Just that it's an announcement from some bureaucrat from some probably corrupt and incompetent Russian ministry.
Not to mention the difficulties of actually producing sufficient quantities of working state of the art processors to replace all those chips from Russian chip foundries.
How many near miss incidents each? I suspect accurate figures atent easy to come by...
I fail to see the reliability advantage of the Soyuz.
The Soyuz can still take you into space. The Space Shuttle can't.
That's infinitely more reliable.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The Russians have cloned foreign hardware before, with varying degrees of success. While it will always be one or two generations behind (because you can't reasonably clone something not yet released), their past history would indicate that these will actually work, if they are willing to commit the necessary resources. With there being less and less difference between generations lately, cloning now makes more sense than it did ten years ago. ARM processors themselves were originally cobbled together by a team with plenty of talent but little financial backing, so who's to say a clone can't be done under the same conditions?
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The recent OpenSSL disasters were the result of the attitude of the open source security community.
Unless you had already been blessed by their High Priests, they would yell " NEVER ROLL YOUR OWN CRYPTO! " at you over and over and over if you tried to practice the craft. They would drown you in ridicule. They would do this even if you merely tried to critique their code!
Now, most reasonable computer programmers don't want to be subjected to this sort of antagonism, so they just wouldn't get involved with reading or writing crypto code because it inevitably meant being on the receiving end of such antagonism.
Then the Disasters came. OpenSSL, which a lot of people quietly suspected was total shit, was indisputably proven to be total shit. The High Priests were shown to be windbags, and void of substance. Their precious code was flawed in the most serious of ways. But more importantly, they were proven to have been wrong several times over.
The whole situation reminds me of the lyrics of a famous song from a few years back, chronicling the fall of the self-appointed "Elite":
Intel has basically won, just no one has caught on yet.
Smaller geometries == faster , cheaper chips but at much more $$$.
Intel is the leader now, no one else wants to spend the $$$ play catch up. We are now talking multiple B$ for a fab plant.
Another generation, game over.
The shuttles could still be made/maintained/used. They aren't, but that is a financial and political decision. It isn't as though they reached a magic expiration date and crumbled to dust. A new one could be built and used, no problem, if there was the money and will to do so.
The GPs point stands.
Hardware down grade by state decree. What could go wrong?
an ill wind that blows no good
I cannot wait to diversify my exploitation techniques. Please russia provide interesting pwning material !
This isn't something serious, just nationalism and/or cronyism. A real domestic processor project? It wouldn't be "dozens of millions of dollars" it would be tens of billions. Intel spent $10 billion on R&D... in 2013 alone. TSMC, who's just a fab not a designer, spent $1.4 billion in 2013.
Semiconductor manufacture is EXPENSIVE. A single modern fab easily tops a billion dollars to build, more like $3 billion. That's just to build it, running it and upgrading it can easily cost that much again over a few years. That is projected to grow to about $15 billion for a high end fab in 2020. All that, and you only have the ability to make chips, you don't actually have any chips to make.
Designing chips is again expensive. You need a bunch of smart, skilled, and experienced engineers and they need to put in a ton of work. It takes years. Companies that do fast design revisions have multiple teams that trade off working on chips, one team will be working on the next gen chip, another team on the gen after that, so that there is enough time to get the designs done.
So if Russia really wanted their own chips, like their own design, their own production, and all that, and wanted said chips to be on the same level as modern chips from Intel, IBM, etc, well they'd have to spend a ton of money, and a good amount of time.
This is, as you say, posturing. License an existing core design (made by Western nations), build an older technology fab, and produce some low end chips that aren't really that useful.
The Soyuz accidents killed a total of 4 people, in 1967 and 1971. The shuttle accidents killed a total of 14 people, in 1986 and 2003.
Your comparison is cherry-picking the facts.
I take you're known for melodrama in your social circles.
The Soyuz is still doing missions, 31 years after its last accident. The Shuttle shuttle was retired in 2011, 8 years after its last accident.
I know which one I would feel safer in today.
This is kind of interesting... but they don't have a modern fab in Russia, do they? It'll take a lot of foreign parts to build a domestic fab...
their entire economy revolves around selling things they can find on the ground.
We are so much better because our economy revolves around moving money between accounts.
In America, you program computer...in Soviet Russia, computer programs you!
This is global capitalism at its best :-) . Now all the US (and Korean and Chinese and Japanese and...) chip manufacturers have a whole nation of potential new competitors. The New Russia is out to crush all economic competitors! Communism within the borders but Capitalism to conquer the world!
(you can assign your own level of humor, sarcasm, and paranoia to this post.)
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
That's why the OpenSSL cretins had their own weird and 100% insecure heap manager. Because OpenSSL was a human creation of NSA and some useful idiots of those.
Not to mention the difficulties of actually producing sufficient quantities of working state of the art processors to replace all those chips from Russian chip foundries.
We Americans do not have a monopoly on smart people or technical know-how. As a matter of fact, for the last 15+ years we have been offshoring much of our high tech manufacturing - it's not just the low tech shit. Intel has been offshoring much of their stuff and I like the idea of karma coming to bite them in the ass.
Russia has LOTS of hard currency and they can buy the best of the best from any company on the planet. So, if they do have a problem, they can just buy someone from Intel, AMD or someone else - or just hire someone that one of those companies canned - I mean "downsized" - what a way to get back at the short sighted-treat people like commodity-corporate assholes.
In other words, I have no doubt that the Russians will be successful - and more power to them. I am looking forward to some advances in microchip technology.
As far as I'm concerned, you've just proven the GP to be correct. You've shown the exact same attitude that he described. You resort to name calling to belittle him because he pointed out very real flaws in OpenSSL. Then you deny that there are serious problems with OpenSSL, even though many of us IT pros have had to deal with two extremely serious OpenSSL flaws with it during the past few months. We aren't talking about the minor bugs we patch now and then, too. Heartbleed was one of the worst, far-reaching software and security disasters (and that is an appropriate term for it) we've ever seen. It far, far exceeds the problems Microsoft software ran into 10 to 12 or so years ago. And on top of all of that, you justify your rancid attitude by claiming that it's okay that OpenSSL is "imperfect", even though the attitude you and others hold is what drove away people who wanted to do their best to help make it as perfect as can be.
Really Heartbleed was one of the worst security disasters we've had? Based on what? How many exploits were there? What was the financial cost? How long did it remain? How many systems were compromised? There is no indications that it was one of the worst security disasters based on any metric.
More people tend to die when a space bus crashes vs a space tricycle.
The person who wrote the bug has described at length where the bug came from. The source code, and email history at the time obviously supports the very non paranoid origin that it came from a performance tweak to avoid allocating and deallocating memory. There was no NSA involvement.
in soviet russia we ARM YOU!
That might not be a bad target. The Russian space program has a history of reliable but fairly conservative designs, e.g. the Soyuz has a solid multi-decade track record. Versus the American space program, which goes for more cutting-edge stuff like the Space Shuttle, but has more reliability problems.
The Space Shuttle was a terrible design and a crappy project.
That aside, if this chip project is half as successful as Soyuz (The only operating manned space vehicle in existence) then I think they'll be pretty damned happy about it.
The Russian government has already helped to creat a fairly successful corporation that specializes in Sparc processors named ÐoeЦÐÐ, or Moscow Center for SPARC Technology (wiki link in Russian here: http://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...ÐoeЦÐÐ) I don't see any reason they would have difficulty doing the same with ARM
Not to mention that the discoverer of the flaw included a one line fix with the announcement.
" But then again, we still have lots of companies trying to send (outsource) tech to China... China who has a long history of taking the tech and spinning it off on their own. Hoy myopic can they be?"
I don't mind China (or Russia) taking the tech. I don't mind when they don't give back. A minor example: the many Android variants running on cheap tablets that can't be upgraded because the source code for their non-standard hardware isn't available. (Technically you can upgrade such tablets but you'd lose a lot of the functions that make it useful, like wifi/bluetooth, maybe even the touch screen, so that you basially wind up with a keyboardless mini PC.)
Sure using a local design would be the ideal but that would require having a usable local design.
However local production has distinct advantages even if the design is imported. Firstly it makes it harder for other countries to cut off supply. Secondly it means that if a backdoor is to be slipped in it must be slipped in at a much earlier stage of the process making it harder to keep secret. Thirdly it means you are sending less money abroad.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
But then they won't be able to pirate Windows for these systems.
Oops! Was I not supposed to point out the elephant in the room?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Look up history of SEMATECH. The US government pumped money over years into microchip design for the specific purpose of making the US the only place to make high end chips. I think we are still to this day riding that way by quite a bit. We did exactly what we complain about other countries doing, such as Chinese with solar panels, and it worked very well.
So, yes the Russians can do it, but it would take a decade to accomplish. If that is their timeline for this, then it will probably work. If their timeline is 2 years, it will probably fail. However, if they go with a differeing technology, as you suggested ARM as an example, and don't care about things like size and power consumption, it will make the challenge much easier for them to meet.
Are you honestly downplaying the seriousness of the Heartbleed security disaster?
What makes Heartbleed so bad is that we don't exactly know how often it has been exploited. It's a problem that existed for many months, affected hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of servers around the world. Many of them still aren't patched. And it isn't the kind of exploit that necessarily gets logged anywhere, too.
It has been proven that it could allow for private keys to be stolen, as demonstrated by those researchers who managed to quickly attack some experimental servers that CloudFlare had set up to test this. I hope I don't have to explain to you the seriousness of compromised private keys.
I recall hearing that the tax authorities in Canada had sensitive taxpayer data stolen from their servers due to this horrible bug, as well.
Those two incidents alone should scare the living shit out of any IT professional. I'm not kidding around. It's completely irresponsible to downplay the severity of this incident. Anyone who says that this is one of the worst computer security incidents to ever have happened is totally and indisputably correct. It could very well be the worst.
My gosh, I do hope that you're just being argumentative in this case in some pathetic effort to save face after being proven wrong earlier, and that you really do understand the serious nature of Heartbleed.
a 20 inch thing! ain't gonna happen...
Hear me out. The more Countries that turn from American Hardware/Software, the more American Companies will question cooperating with agencies like the NSA. How can that not be good news? unless you care nothing about your rights or the Constitution.
What I wonder is Isn't the entire CA trust chain suspect now ? If so, why is everybody acting like nothing happened ?
Aren't we all just covering this up out of practical pragmatism then ?
Smart move by the KGB to protect their interests! Good idea. I'd love to make my own CPU chip as well, then I could spy on everyone that uses it... well I can't because its illegal and dangerous for me to do so, but in theory... In any case, good move. Knight to check queen.
"This isn't something serious, just nationalism and/or cronyism. A real domestic processor project? It wouldn't be "dozens of millions of dollars" it would be tens of billions. Intel spent $10 billion on R&D... in 2013 alone. TSMC, who's just a fab not a designer, spent $1.4 billion in 2013."
I won't dispute your figures, but I do find them on the high side.
First, the budget for such a project doesn't need to be spent in one-go. The project can be developed in stages with the money spent being increased as each milestone is reached.
Second, the CPU's don't need to be bleeding-edge. The article already stated that an existing design will be (re)used, so the budget for research is going to be drastically reduced. Consequently, Russia can simply import the parts for a fab that's one or even two generation behind the latest process, again resulting in signifcant cost savings.
I Soviet Russia, computer chips program YOU.
*In
Need more coffee...
Do I have a trollmod following me today, or a shillmod? I'd guess the former. Return to thy bridge to sexually harass goats, and let my comments be.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... Soyuz (The only operating manned space vehicle in existence) ...
I think you overlooked the Shenzhou. The Chinese probably copied a lot from the Soyuz designs, but it is an all-new constructions and the next flight is already in the planning.
http://www.moneyandshit.com/us...
If you don't count the crashes several years before the first space bus was built, the space tricycle has had zero fatalities.
Weight: Thirty kilograms.
Power draw: 5.4A at 18V.
Operating temperature range: 90-600 K
Maximum acceleration: 3 km s-2.
MTBF: Limited only by proton decay.
This site has gone to complete shit. Timothy, you're fucking fired and off my list.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That's why the OpenSSL cretins had their own weird and 100% insecure heap manager.
I thought C was the main reason why they had their own weird and insecure heap manager? Because the same people who seem to be yelling "never roll your own crypto!" are ignoring the yell of "never roll your own memory management!" from the actual MM-savvy people, GC people, and other similar creatures.
Ezekiel 23:20
In Soviet Russia, there's now a right to ARM bears. (Chipping for veterinary purposes, you see. They care about their bears.)
Ezekiel 23:20
You're raising an interesting point: the Russians have historically cloned PDPs and IBM mainframes (mostly for SW reasons, I guess), and they succeeded - sort of, given that their component base was rather limited. But the ARM people you mention did the design they did precisely because their resources (financial, manufacturing, design iterations etc.) were very limited. They gambled everything on simplicity, and it paid off. That wasn't the case with those Russian-built IBMs and PDPs, though. I wonder what would have happened if the Russians hadn't blindly cloned US hardware and gone instead for architectures matched for simplicity, like Novix NC4016 or similar things. It was way faster than anything from Intel at that time, and way more simple, so simple that even Tesla Piestany could have manufactured it (sorry, Slovaks ;-)).
Ezekiel 23:20
At Borat Computerz wez use the bestz componentz from Siberia. Only the bezt zlave er I mean dedicat3d workerz r used. We no copyz Amerikan computerz we only do for muther Ruzia.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Interestingly, avia-buses crash less frequently than avia-tricycles - so flying on a FAA-licensed commercial airliner is safer than on small twin-engine.
Not so with spacecrafts. I may argue that Soyuz changed more since it was designed - because each vehicle is manufactured for each flight. Shuttle vehicle is created once, and has more limitations to later upgrades. Timeline of crashes is very different for two vehicles - two for Soyuz when it was actively developed and two for Shuttle when it remained more frozen, because the vehicles are manufactured once, before some of them get destroyed. While they both had two catastrophes in about the same number of flights - and similar proportions of people were killed in relation to total number of people carried to space - I'd argue that the timeline of crashes favors Soyuz.
I think the manned rocket China uses counts as a manned space vehicle, though I don't know if they have one of their disposable rockets currently constructed awaiting launch (in existence).
Not C, some weird OS somewhere had a sucky heap manager so they made their own (C just says you'll have something, over the years that something meant something different on different systems). And yea, the OpenSSL people were correct, never roll your own crypto because even a PhD in crypto doesn't really make you qualified in it. With that said, rewriting a known crypto algorithm is mostly fine, the issue OpenSSL had is bad programming, not bad crypto.
You must be awesome fun at parties.
Railing at 'intellectual elites' is a Shibboleth which marks people out as Dunning-Kruger asshats.
Running Windows on Intel would perhaps give you a platform with numerous built-in 'backdoors' for helpyourselves access by americans. Like the chinese, the russians want to have their own backdoors and not someone elses.
The entire CA chain? Only if the private keys of all the root servers were subject to the exploit. But, honestly, patching and updating the entire set would probably be the safest thing to do since it is likely at least one was compromised, and that would be the only way to be sure.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
But they are not solving it, just using ARM does nothing, it's still developed by a company in an NSA friendly country. How is russia going to audit that code? If they want to get away from foreign hardware then get away from it and develop your own CPU. Write a new one from the ground up, it's really not that hard (performance is the hard part).
If the CA is doing it right, they only had to reissue the signed certificates of endusers, but they might have had to replace intermediate certificates.
Many exploits existed for years and we don't know how long the bad guys had them. That's the nature of the thousands of exploits that come out. All the time you see new exploits dating back to Windows Server 2002. The reason you are so freaked is because you don't know about the others.
As proving stuff you haven't proven anything. You are just asserting. As for Canada it was a teenager trying it out. He didn't do anything. Nothing much happened. The fact that this was the first example that comes to mind proves my point.
A good fab will cost ~7 billion dollars. A few million dollars is not enough to staff basic operations for a year.
Making chips from Intel spin-off ARM derived engineering isn't the same as making your own.
It is not remotely in-house development. It does not remotely remove the "built-in backdoor" problem. It does not remotely make Russia self-sustainable in terms of design, fabrication, production, distribution, or utilization.
At best this is very weak propaganda for people who know nothing about silicon.
Don't forget that while people have been talking about the NSA, most US companies view security has no ROI so have left themselves wide open to any determined attacker with the belief that Geek Squad (on the SMB scale), or Infosys (on the enterprise scale with its armies of H-1Bs) can fix anything.
Russia has all the pieces to the puzzle:
IP? They got it.
Raw materials? Yep.
Factories? Easily done, via building or having China or Iran build it for them.
Trained people? Russians are damn smart.
I would not be surprised to see an ARM or even an amd64 CPU from them in a year's time. China is an extremely close ally and can start making chips for them in days to weeks if push comes to shove.
I think they're shouting several claims here...
1. Processor costs are too high.
2. Shipping costs are too high for something that fragile.
3. No innovation lately from Intel and AMD, so they're too easily cloned.
Finally! Something that will be slow enough to keep those stupid Russian kids off my damn online games. I doubt their piece of crap chip would handle Neverwinter or MWO.
Right back to the pre-90s, great to have choice again.
for the specific purpose of making the US the only place to make high end chips
which is why all the x86 chips I've bought have "made in Malaysia" stamped on them.
I guess you have forgotten ARM that produces the designs for high end chips that are built by many others, and those guys also make SoC chips with all kinds of stuff on them.
its an ARM or did you not comprehend that
After the Snowden revelations it is now assumed that Intel compromised their CPU's extra instruction sets that are useful for encryption (making things much faster for encrypting things if used). The NSA then has Co's etc. pushed to use this capability via outside experts and "experts" from college's.
Although many are too old to remember, we had this debate in the 90's over the clipper chip (allowed encryption via a chip with a NSA back door) and it was roundly rejected by the American Public - in the end the NSA has put that capability into our chips in Secret and urged industry to use those compromised capabilities of those chips through "experts" the industry depends on for good advice.
Here's a great quote from a discussion on encryption software - "Remember how an intel employee was pressuring Theodore Tso to only use CPU hardware random, but he couldn't explain why entropy mixing was worse? Funny how that happens.... https://plus.google.com/+Theod..."
This is quite reasonable of Russia (and basically any government that doesn't want the U.S. to have access to their secrets), they should consider all current generation Intel and AMD CPU's to be shot through with U.S. Govt/NSA required exploits and weaknesses. But they should also consider that all the supporting chips used are compromised as well (particularly the ones handling IP communication - if designed by U.S. corps or companies friendly to the U.S.). This is a tall order, but one that needs to happen (saying that as a U.S. citizen who doesn't want to live in a total surveillance world in perpetuity) - not that I'd trust the Russian version, either.
intel fabs are in the U.S. The packaging, the wire bonding. That's done in Malaysia. But you have a point. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, and a number of others have facilities that are quite capable of making high quality high performance processors.
Your statistics are misleading. The last Soyuz fatality was way back in 1971. The Russians have improved it since then.
By the end of the Shuttle program, Soyuz had been fatality-free for 40 years, whereas the Shuttle had been fatality-free for only 7.
They also cloned the Z80, the 8086, the Casio pocket computer, HP calculators, the Apple ][... it wasn't all big iron. Some of it went beyond cloning, to support the Cyrillic character set where it otherwise wouldn't. Aside from the fundamental mistake of using the "metric inch", thus making it impossible to mix and match parts with Western ones, they actually did a reasonably good job on most of it. Some of it still works.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The Russians can't pull the same crap the Chinese might still be able to do. They aren't the Soviet Union anymore, with an encapsulated economy. They operate as a capitalist nation, and they're not going to be able to "copy/clone" hardware, like they used to. They'll be shutdown economically by the WTO. They're going to have to leverage outdated designs that have copyright close to expiration. What they should do is partner on some level with the Chinese, so they at least can access modern fabrication facilities and techniques.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Not used any more means there will be no more shuttle accidents! How's that for safety.
And you honestly think other nations are not doing the same thing? Home grown chips like this will just let them embed their spy tech into them is all, under the guise of 'nationalism'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
From chips designed by USA to chips designed by UK. That will show them!
No. CA's root certificate was never on a publicly accessible server. This was an idea thrown around at the time as an example but the example isn't true. Besides most websites have reissued certificates and most users have gotten the new ones. Most important websites also have additional checks which make man in the middle hard to do. Is somebody somewhere going to get hit? Sure. There is a big target area. But this was an easy to fix problem (though widely spread) and it was addressed quickly and effectively.
Honestly it is a plus for open source. When they did drop the ball the able to own and thus fix it very fast.
I for one don't understand the ARM approach at all, either. There are better alternatives.
OpenSPARC brings to mind. It wouldn't take a lot of time for the Russians to scale it up and to make it much better. With that, they would have a chance at exports too.
But with yet another ARM... Nope.
http://blog.targethealth.com/?p=352 Scroll down to #7, on a Digital Equipment Corporation CVAX chip in Cyrillic: "When you care to steal the very best"
Sorry, but the Soyuz accidents happened something like 40 years ago. That's 40 years without loss of crew accidents.
Given the frequency of the STS accidents, I would expect also you to conclude that the Soyuz design is safer.
They can switch hardware all they want - but they still need to write the apps
and those processors arent running x86 or x64 code
That's because you're an idiot who's been brainwashed by your media.
The chips are packaged in Malaysia. (Chip packaging is a relatively commoditized easy to do process.) Modern Intel chips undergo wafer processing in the US, Israel or Ireland. (They have one fab in China that makes 65 nm chipsets.)
Degrading security in encryption code is a whole lot easier than putting an internet approachable backdoor in a microprocessor ... you aren't going to hide the latter in a single line bug.
There was a reason USSR give up making processors in the 80's.
I can't see what could be possibly changed from that time - au contraire, the status quo beame even more hardened.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I assume they have an architecture license and are not implementing some macro.
The fact that they don't have their own fabs is a bigger problem.
It is well known that all technological progress comes out of cold war. What else could have motivated Americans to re-enter manned space flight. So, PLEASE choose a new state of the art instruction set rather than old Intel or ARM! Something optimized specifically for compilers and modern programming languages.
Baring that, I will gladly take an X64-only clone with no 32/16/real mode legacy. Would at least get Intel to stop sitting on their butts and get interested in progress and efficiency.
There is an opinion that the USSR had lost the computer race because the party leaders chose to steal and clone western designs and software instead of doing their own thing, of which the USSR scientists and researchers would be rather capable.
Dude it's not openSSL that's really flawed, I mean boo hoo, they hid and passed under everyone's nose some faults then made it blow up in everyone's face, so what, even if you had a perfect OpenSSL, if the hardware itself is fucked, you're out of luck, you can throw any kind of software at it, they can watch the screen as you can watch it when you type, they can log the keystrokes, etc., the hardware itself is rigged. Why wouldn't it be? Duh! Which is what this whole Russian chip article is about, getting secure hardware, but they go about it by yet another anal retentive way, design your own custom code for an Arm processor, then send it off to a chip foundry somewhere (i'm guessing the chip foundries in Korea, Japan or Taiwan, maybe US for IBM, or Puerto Rico and Malaysia for Intel, if IBM and Intel are willing to do subcontracting for Arm), then voilà, get your own secure chip the easy way. Yet another bullshit they are trying to pass by everyone, hey, everyone, your computer is secure, start hiding some secrets in it, we swear we can't see them! By the way Arm is retarded in the way that they are a pure intellectual property company, they own absolutely no physical manufacturing facilities, and most of the Arm chips are made in the East Asian Tiger countries. At least IBM and Intel does have their own fabs and don't trust it to someone else, in fact I was looking to get different commercial versions of Unix instead of Linux on ebay for cheap, and guess what, I got Solaris 8 for like 8 bux for Intel platform, but there is no way to get IBM AIX for intel platform, can you guess why? Because IBM is not retarded enough to trust Intel chips and assume liability over what happens on them. Which is why Microsoft ditches any liability too for their software, because they don't make the whole shebang computer. If you want trustworthy computing, get it from IBM that makes both the AIX Unix software, and the chips, be it RS/6000, or PowerPC, or System/370 Mainframes, but in each case IBM controls both the hardware and the software part, so they can assume liability when the shit hits the fan, as opposed to going after Microsoft or Intel, and they point the finger at each other, saying it's not my fault, it's the other guy's responsibility. Maybe that's why the computing business moved from IBM dominance into the MS/Intel way of doing business, of evading responsibility reasons. Dividing up responsibility between two or more people means no responsibility, the best slogan in a team environment when trying to find who's responsible is the standard answer from every single person: it wasn't me, I didn't do it. In a job environment if you can figure out a way to make people work alone, divide up the work to single person unit stages, with personal responsibility in each, you automatically get a magical improvement in quality, productivity and profitability. If you can't divide up the responsibility, then military style top down command works better than some ad-hoc gang of nobody's in charge and responsible. And in such cases being on the bottom keeps you out of the responsibility most, saying I was just following the command of my superiors, and didn't really care, (care is not the best word, didn't really fight them, didn't really hold up production over an issue i felt was not right) because they were responsible if it didn't work out correctly. Monarchy style top down command if often more efficient than Congress-like debate between a few hundred elected representatives, who take forever to decide, so in time of war the President is like a dictator for the military, and Congress and Senate can criticize or overrule weeks of months later, but they cannot make the on time, millisecond decisions required by war, like a monarch, or dictator-like president. Which is how teamwork in a work environment is often most efficient, we all listen to one guy, and do what he says, not because we agree with it, or he is the smartest, in fact he could be the dumbest of us but we put him in charge and listen to him and do what he says, beca
Intel makes their stuff in the USA, AMD in Europe and Singapore. I don't know a ton about mainland China's semiconductor industry, but most of the bleeding edge work is done in the US, Taiwan, and Europe.
-Ted http://www.freemathhelp.com/
The Soyuz had two loss of crew accidents in 120 flights. And ten more mission failures.
Shuttle had two loss of crew accidents in 135 flights. And no extra mission failures.
I fail to see the reliability advantage of the Soyuz.
The difference is that the Soyus does not have nearly as much launch delays as the Space Shuttle. The weather could delay a Space Shuttle start for months. That is also part of reliability - a launcher is worthless if you can't use it because the weather is not perfect.
Hahaha - 30 kg is like 66 lbs for a CPU (you'd need dolly for your military smartphone), consuming 5.4x18=97.2 Watts, from liquid nitrogen 90K to 600K-273.15=327C (327*9/5+32 = 620 Fahrenheit), 3 km/s2=3000 m/s2, divided by 9.806 m/s2 = 306g acceleration, and proton decay has never been observed, but, according to Wikipedia, by most recent grand unified theories of physics calculations the lowest possible limit on half life for proton decay is about 1.29×10^34 years via positron decay. That's a long MTBF, mean time between failures, when the age of the universe since the Big Bang is estimated at 13.8x10^9 years.
Those look like some Soviet/Russian specs. Inefficient as fuck, but when it comes to reliability, they stand up any kind of abuse, unbreakable, and idiot proof. And over engineered with safety factors of 9000x, and that's how you end up with 60+ lbs for a CPU.
Back in the late 90's when I was still a computing fan building custom computers and overclocking the CPU's by a few MHz to get extra speed, I remember when shopping online you had to pay extra based on serial numbers/batches, and origins of the Intel CPU's, and I think it was Malaysia and Puerto Rico Intel fabs that made the price difference for overclockability. That's kinda neat to know they have wafer processing in Ireland and Israel, I always assumed they'd do at least some of it in the US too, if nothing else, keep a pilot flame of production going just in case there is a global war and you can't get to places like Malaysia easily.
The thing about war is that it always bites you in the ass unexpected, it does not come preannounced 10 years before it, so you can prepare for it. Back in the feudal days there was a custom of honor of declaring war between neighbor princes, sending an ultimatum, and waiting for an answer, for an acceptance of war, before committing to any action. By WW2 the German blitzkrieg term's essence was not sending such an ultimatum. So you don't get a letter in the mail declaring war against you, with an adversary patiently waiting for you to reply and accept it, giving you a few years to prepare, and pull your manufacturing base from places like Malaysia.
Not when it comes to safety.
"Memory allocation is too important to leave to the programmer" vs. "memory allocation is too important to leave to the system". Also, emacs vs. vi.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
So they could clone their own i386 system, with DR DOS (with source code) or FreeDOS. DOS is not to be underestimated for military use, especially russian mentality type one. DOS is like the ultimate Russian/Soviet design. Retardedly simple, fast, lacks basic features you think you absolutely need til you get used to the workarounds of not having them, it's idiot proof, unbreakable. For one it does not "crash" by sudden power loss, all you lose is whatever data you have in RAM since you last hit the save to disk button, it has no disk cache (other than some disk buffers that are pretty quick), and the way to power off DOS is by cutting the power to it.Even dead simple and barebones commandline linux console is not military enough in behavior compared to DOS, as in some versions it goes through a "Sending all processes the SIGHALT signal", then "Sending all processes the SIGKILL signal" masturbation, let alone Windows displaying a "Please wait", and "Windows is Shutting Down" masturbation in your face process.
Except that the last Soyuz accident was in 1971, and these problems have been fixed.
Who cares about the code right now?
They're facing trade restrictions at the moment for the shit they're pulling in Ukraine.
The first step is producing their own chips, so they're not reliant on others.
In the Soviet Union human life was more expandable than in the USA, Had this attitude been different, it may have reflected itself in the accident rates.
Well, I'd fully agree with idea that flying to space is pretty risky business. However, given the choice... Right now humanity has Soyuz and Schenzhou - so today really there is little choice, the devices are pretty similar. May be crewed Dragon will be safer - need to see how abort tests will go (that system on Soyuz saved life to Strekalov and Titov in 1983) and analyze how much powered landing may be screwed (can Soyuz-1 disaster with Komarov be avoided).
obviously I have some free time today. believe it or not, I've been working furiously in between furious slashdottings, and then rehydrating.
http://www.secretprojects.co.u...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What percentage of processors are made in (mainland) China?
Outside of cheap Wun Hung Lo tablet and phone SoC's, I'd say 0%.
http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/2013/03/14/china-widens-lead-as-worlds-largest-manufacturer/
Tee hee hee. Do unto others as though would have them do unto thee. Sometimes I'd like someone to explain a joke to me.
Shuttle had two loss of crew accidents in 135 flights. And no extra mission failures.
That's very misleading. After the 1986 Challenger explosion, one of the intended goals of the shuttle, to deploy and maintain spy satellites and equipment, was considered too risky. As a consequence many of these missions were shifted to other launch platforms such as the Delta rocket family. I'd argue that all of these should be considered mission failures, from the shuttle's perspective.
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/2012/09/20/mips-acquisition-drawing-to-a-close2c-broadcom-and-arm-in-forefront/
The C.P.U!
tone
I enjoyed the drama, it was almost elite shit :)
Copyright close to expiration?
You mean all those designs from the 1800's?
No, you need to have your head removed. "In soviet russia" jokes are old as shit and have ceased to be funny.
I'd expect them to be a whole lot more 'reliable' than the NSA fiddled with variants. Let's not pretend it is nothing more than that. With a country the size and capability of Russia it would be pretty silly to leave it's essential IT infrastructure reliant on the US, China or the EU. It is a sound logical decision to have all essential IT and communication infrastructure based upon locally built and audited components and if there are any 'er' special features they are theirs and not someone else's. It is becoming very much, who can we trust with our digital communications, NO ONE, especially not our own government agencies. As for designing CPUs, well, I believe the US have laws that govern that, when it comes to national security any defence contractor is legally allowed to infringe upon patents and copyrights as they see fit and keep it secret, so one suspects Russia will hardly behave any differently. Of course when they 'er' borrow designs they will have to check rather carefully for hidden features, so it would be far smarter to borrow specific elements of CPU architecture, rather than the whole whole CPU architecture.
Of course making exact copies of other countries chips does provide the advantage of adding your chips with built in special features into their supply chain, so fun all round. All brought to you by those big ole bag of dicks who thought is was all so much more fun to break computer security then legally enforce it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Haswell CPUs also have multiple autonomous CPUs (besides the built in graphics) that can run even when the chip is nominally powered down. These controllers have no published specs. The architecture is unknown, the software is unknown.
In the post-Snowden era it is also known the the NSA has a way to get data off systems that are separated by an air gap from the outside environment.
Now if you were one of the major powers in the world would you want to have a supercomputer, or any computer in a sensitive installation, saying "Intel Inside"?
It's not just about nuclear simulation or CFD weapon design codes. It's about oil/gas exploration, wartime logistics, economics, drug design, and climate forecasts (even if the Republicans don't believe in climate change, the Russians and Chinese are not that stupid).
So building your own CPU on fabs where you have physical control is a matter of national security. It would be unsurprising if certain government programs in the US only used Intel chips made in the US. If it was my responsibility that's what I would do.
Why is Snark Required?
Sorry, patents close to expiration.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I say more power to them, but it certainly brings a little heaviness to my heart. It makes me feel like we really are returning to a Cold War status globally but with a lot of new players with a lot more weight than before. I don't think I want to stick around to see the madness. I want to get to a winning side before much longer, and I don't see staying American as a way of doing that.
Indeed. How else could they have won the cold war?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Never heard of Buran???? It's the russian space shuttle, it probably would have worked out had they not gone bankrupt. Also, why the russians didn't get to the moon ever was they couldn't get there heavy lift rocket working...
Been saying this for years now since the earliest reports of NSA spying and the cooperation of technology companies came out. Most people kept saying it was nonsense that global trust in US technology can never be lost if only because ours is "the best" and is too expensive to replace. Seems to me that's not a deciding factor these days. The bad behaving US government is causing real harm to business now. As soon as business begins to realize how toxic that relationship is, they will stop doing it. But then again, we still have lots of companies trying to send (outsource) tech to China... China who has a long history of taking the tech and spinning it off on their own. Hoy myopic can they be?
The NSA is one reason why, when the Russian CPUs or computers become available (built to metric dimensions), I will get one or more.
If they are really very very good, I will kiss Intel goodbye. I hate overpriced hardware.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Well since you put it that way, I guess it's all okay because "everyone is [likely] doing it." But apparently that isn't really the case. In fact, the US is one of the greatest sources of spyware both commercial and "unsanctioned." We sell it to governments like Iran on a regular basis. And if other governments were really doing it, do you think they believed we weren't while they were? They kept using all US technologies the entire time? I find that to be highly unlikely. I think what fits observable reality better is that they aren't doing it (infecting exported products and services) and believe the US wouldn't be that bold or stupid as it would literally jeopardize the US's global marketplace if it were discovered.
If you test that theory against observable reality, I'd say that fits much better than what you're suggesting.
..can it run Crysis?
based on a Western design means they stole the tech thru espionage and then claimed to have designed it themselves-Soviets are good mathematicians engineers but they arent inventive-helps when the boss doesnt have you shot for failure
Hi, is it just me, or does the old "intel inside" slogan ring new bells after the NSA scandal last year?
Using hardware produced by companies under heavy influence of other nations Security Agencies. What could go wrong?
Russian stuff varied a lot in practice, but some of it was actually brilliantly simple. Like Rutan's brilliant simplification of landing gear for a flying spaceship, some Russian designs wind up being better sinply becasue they *avoid* the problem rather than trying to solve it head-on.
Two examples I saw when working at NASA JSC in the 90's:
1) The Russians used a simple low pressure cooling system for their space stations and the original design of their ISS modules. This allowed them to easily use freeze-proof, but toxic coolants - since they operated below cabin pressure, if there was a leak, it was air into the coolant, not the other way around. The US approach used pressurized coolant, was insanely complicated by comparison, and *still* had the potential to freeze solid.
2) US spacesuit gloves are ridiculously complicated structures with many layers and exotic materials and parts laboriously assembled to make sure that they won't leak, or if they do, they'll self-seal, etc. so that a glove rip (a likely point of damage) won't lead to loss of suit pressure. Maintaining any dexterity in the glove while doing this is an obvious challenge with the many redundant layers. The Russians, on the other hand, use something more like a thick rubber glove (modified to avoid inflation effects), and a simple inflatable cuff that seals off around the astronaut's wrist in case of a leak - turns out that a full vacuum in the glove will blow a bunch of capillaries in your hand, turning it red for a week, but you'll be fine the week after. This gives a glove with more dexterity, at a cost that's only a tiny fraction of a US spacesuit glove...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
russian technology! #rutech t34m p4r4n01d
The Zilog made the Z80 IP available for free, their business plan was to allow others to make compatible processors but sell theirs as the "original" and more technically advanced than the others, so the Soviets, the Brazilians, the Japanese and the Germans, etc. did not clone the Z80, the made compatiable designs.
And it was the East Germans not the Russians that made the 8086 compatible processor, it was a bit slow