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."

Comments

Re:No, that means it is still being used

[Anonymous Coward]

Gods, man, lay off the goddamn kool-aid, will you?

If you want to discuss irrelevancies, then why not bring up how much more the shuttle could do on a mission than Soyuz?

Well, right now the shuttles can do precisely zero, there are no missions at the various museums they're on display.

They have very close records.

Right. Now we're in fairyland. So far the Soyuz program had 2 crashes, one in its first manned mission (Soyuz 1) in '67 and the other Soyuz 11 in '71. That's about 43 years of no reliability problems, and we're a few generations later - so the reliability of Soyuz 11 is irrelevant for modern missions. Now compare that with the shuttle, which only started test flights in '81 and operational ones in '82. Yeah, it was _designed_ to do more, but that brought about those reliability problems. Of course the shuttle was quite more sophisticated and having it work as well as it did was no mean feat, just ask the Russians how Buran went for them. But in no way the overall reliability is in the same class as the Soyuz. Do few things but do them well works in engineering, be it aeronautics or Unix design.

But let's just consider the ratio of failed to successful missions, that seems more reasonable. By that metric, they are pretty close.

Right. Shall I take your word for it? hmm, let's check it out. Throw in some total mission time since we're at it.

• * Space Shuttle: 135 missions (1981-2011), about 1322 days of mission duration, accidents in 1986 and 2003, total casualties 14
• * Soyuz, all versions: 122 missions (ongoing since 1967), heck, too lazy to sum up all the days in space but if you only count the flights in the last 4 years you get more than double the Shuttle mission time (Soyuz flights tend to spend about 5 months or more flying, this has been the case with few exceptions for more than 20 years); 2 accidents, '67 and '71, total casualties 4.

So, a couple of accidents in the first 4 years (and 10 manned missions) is totally the same as the shuttle who, after the 2003 accident, still had foam-related scares in 2007, 4 years later. In short, you have no idea what you're talking about. Feel free to do armchair comparisons to your heart's content though, and do ignore the fact that nobody is building shuttle-type vehicles anymore for ... some strange and incomprehensible reasons.