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:Lets Get Real

[Luckyo]

When it came to bleeding edge military technology, USSR was top notch. Don't believe the bullshit propaganda on this one. I recommend starting looking on documentaries made around 1995-2000 many of which can be found on youtube. Back then Russia was opening up to the West and a lot of massive technological marvels that they produced were first seen by the West.

To quote a Lockheed Martin head engineer of space engine program after seeing the test firing of Soviet closed circuit engine which he flat out refused to believe to be possible until that firing:

"Seeing this made us ask some very uncomfortable questions about our research and development processes".

Just like USSR was behind in some things, USA was behind in some other things. And USSR's solution to many parts where it was behind were stunningly brilliant. For example nearly fully automated long range aircraft that was MiG-25 was massively automated and computerized. On vacuum tubes. US and Japanese specialists didn't believe it when they got the thing from Belenko, and there were several documentaries covering the plane and Belenko's case which had some very interesting talking points from engineers working on it.

And after Cold War ended, when asked why, the explanation was that vacuum tubes actually survived extreme conditions of extreme altitude and extreme speed flight much better than transistors, and that it was more efficient to code around their slowness than to burden the aircraft with climate control systems for transistor based computers.

Assuming people like that won't make any breakthroughs is simply stupid.

Re:Good luck with that

[Mal-2]

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?

No, that means it is still being used

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:No, that means it is still being used

[kirovs]

No, it does not. He falls prey to conformational bias. First the difference in number of flights (135 vs 120) is insignificant. Second, first Souyz flew in 1966 (or 1967, don't remember). It did that almost 15 years before the first shuttle flight. Therefore it had to use older technology and do so without much of the experience, technology and knowledge that the designers of the shuttle had. Perhaps it is not coincidence that the 2 losses Souyz had were before the shuttle even took off. Compare this to the shuttle failures. I think that Souyz is more reliable than the shuttle, but I admit that this is opinion rather than data supported hypothesis since data points are few and unreliable (near misses).

Re:No, that means it is still being used

[avmich]

We're safely away from the original topic, so anything flies. Including Soyuz and Shuttle.

When you're talking about reliability of these two crafts, you may talk about "design reliability" or "device reliability". Which design is more reliable? Well, Shuttle has advantage of hindsight, some less drastic loads, and numerically - more flights accomplished. Soyuz has advantage of last death 33 years ago - and of design being constantly tweaked. I.e., Discovery and Atlantis were physically created in 1980-s, way before Challenger catastrophe, with knowledge available then. Granted, Shuttle had advantage of vastly more resources spent on design and overall architecture was created some 10 years after that for Soyuz. Yet Discovery and Atlantis had - not all, but many - designs frozen in 1980.

Of course, some other systems were constantly upgraded until the end of the program.

Soyuz also has some architectural decision unchangeable - e.g., infamous capsule diameter. Yet other things - including even small increases in that diameter in specific places to allow taller crew onboard - kept changing - they are still changing. Just like Shuttle, Soyuz had avionics upgrades. Unlike Shuttle - because Soyuz is more modular - Soyuz had changes in Orbital module (reflected in mass and size) and in Propulsion unit (e.g., unified fuel storage system). If we assume that Soyuz landing - for example - is simpler, has less failure modes than Shuttle - then it's easier to make it safer, everything else being equal, which of course it isn't.

We should admit that Soyuz manufacturer has greater flexibility in changing Soyuz for next flight. For example, if a critical flaw - as it was after Soyuz-11 - is found, the next flight can be delayed and the craft substantially redesigned - as Soyuz-T was born. Not so with Shuttles - after Challenger NASA still had 3 units, which were substantially made the same, and couldn't recreate - or reassemble - them anew. In other words, we can argue that Shuttle reliability is more frozen when a Shuttle is assembled, while Soyuz is assembled for each flight - and for each flight there is an opportunity to learn from previous mistakes.

Not that it's only beneficial to Soyuz. Shuttle has the benefit of being tested in actual flight - the same craft flies again and again. Soyuz maker can't easily prevent problems related to a particular vehicle - since that vehicle flies only once - it only can learn from previous flights and improve the next one. But here we have more opportunities for iterations - that's perhaps why Soyuz last death was in 1971, and why Soyuz maker is so conservative with changing Soyuz today. Elon Musk is, in the eyes of Energia, a reckless cowboy calling for accidents to happen.

Suppose Shuttle would fly again. Can NASA learn enough from Columbia? Can it change Shuttle so that it won't suffer from falling ice? Reliably? Will it cause substantial redesign? May be, but Shuttle is unlikely to fly again. Now, Soyuz is still flying. Will it fly 20 more years? Will it get an unusual enough situation to critically fail - despite all precations and all history of redesigns? May be. We'll see.

Re:I wonder what their reasoning is...?

[drinkypoo]

" As of 2010, the country [the united states] remains the world's largest manufacturer, representing a fifth of the global manufacturing output."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

[citation needed] because sadly, your citation does not itself provide a proper citation. It simply links to an entire department of the UN, that is not acceptable. Can you provide a proper citation that explains what "global manufacturing output" means? Does that include things assembled in the USA from foreign parts, like International-Navistar engines with blocks cast in China? The block is the most important part of the engine, to me that motor is at least half-Chinese.

Why do people keep saying this?

Probably because they have seen no credible evidence to the contrary.

Re:Good luck with that

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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 ;-)).