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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."
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.