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

Business sells to bad government, there is a cost!

[erroneus]

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?

Re:It will be interesting to see how good these ch

[CrimsonAvenger]

The Russian space program has a history of reliable but fairly conservative designs, e.g. the Soyuz has a solid multi-decade track record.

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.

Re:Good luck with that

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

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?

American arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Same shit as the Chinese Longsoon processor

[careysub]

...

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.

...

All is as you say. But your conditional statement reveals why your argument is irrelevant.

Why do the Russian chips need "to be on the same level as modern chips from Intel, IBM, etc,"? They aren't trying to compete against those companies. They aren't selling them on the open market. They are simply using them of desktop computers and servers in the government, by government purchasing decision.

Commercial processors reached the level that they can fulfill all the real functional needs of the vast majority of desktop applications years ago. A decade old chip running decade old office software can do everything nearly everyone working in an office needs to do as well as the latest and "greatest". Microsoft, Intel, and the PC makers now work in quasi-collusion to force "upgrades" on businesses that do not need them or want them to keep the revenue flowing, but with diminishing success at doing so. Witness the fact that 28% of PCs still run Windows XP despite facing the artificial pressure of support termination by Microsoft, and not being able to buy any XP computers for years.

The advantages of using the newest chips have little or nothing to do with supporting the core office functions for which they are purchased - it is to run "eye candy", power saving (not an issue Russia cares about), or applications that actually harm typical office productivity.

The issue is a bit more complicated for servers - but most server applications only require a tiny fraction of modern chip capabilities, which is why high degrees of virtualization are now common. The Russians will have to use more server chips, but each app will still run fine.