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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."
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.
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...
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.
Not paying attention? Russia is also breaking free of the petro-dollar monopoly. You may not think much of it, but the fact has been that all oil and gas has been traded in US dollars around the globe. That has been one of the reasons US dollars have maintained any value at all. With so much of the US production and even many services going overseas, we simply aren't producing anything here. At least not the way we once did and still can.
There are nations interested in de-Americanizing the world. I can't say I blame them right now. But as things fail to turn around or get corrected, we in the US are going feel the hurt in ways which are painful to imagine.
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.
That, and reiderstvo. Who, in their right mind, would want to start a business, if some well-connected cunt is simply going to steal your entire company off you?
Putin and his crew are Russia's worst enemy, if only for the fact that all the robbers and corrupt officials are an integral part of his much-vaunted 'power vertical'.
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"
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.
Not paying attention? Russia is also breaking free of the petro-dollar monopoly. You may not think much of it, but the fact has been that all oil and gas has been traded in US dollars around the globe. That has been one of the reasons US dollars have maintained any value at all. With so much of the US production and even many services going overseas, we simply aren't producing anything here. At least not the way we once did and still can.
There are nations interested in de-Americanizing the world. I can't say I blame them right now. But as things fail to turn around or get corrected, we in the US are going feel the hurt in ways which are painful to imagine.
I know this is a favorite conspiracy among internet commenters for whatever reason, but the petrodollar conspiracy is a myth. The US dollar has value because it is legal tender in the worlds largest economy. The United States is also the worlds largest manufacturer, surpassing the next five manufacturers combined in total output. It also requires these goods to be sold in dollars. Domestically, the United States also has the largest capital holdings in the world, estimated to be valued in hundreds of trillions of dollars. Since the dollar is legal tender, these capital assets are also valued and traded in dollars. It is also the world's historically most stable currency, making it very attractive for sovereign reserve funds.
Source: I'm taking honors economics in high school right now.
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.
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 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.
Yeltsin was an drink-sodden idiot who made the entire world a worse place. NOBODY in their right mind thinks the world is safer with a weak Russia. And the neoliberal experiment in Russia was nothing more than a massive crime against the Russian people -- you'll get very few arguments from anybody there (I've seen what these arseholes did to Hungary, and it was nowhere near as bad there). But here's where things start to go wrong -- in the Russian popular imagination, the adventures of the Chicago Boys in Russia (and the chaos it visited upon your country), is now synonymous with modern standards of good governance that we demand of our own governments in the West.
Putin is a missed opportunity, in that he has the power and a mandate to turn Russia into a normal country, governed by the rule of law. Instead, we have a strong Russia, making a nuisance out of itself everywhere, instead of leading from the front. And because you have a completely cowed press, Russian political culture has ossified, and you'll be stuck with Lukashenko-lite until he either dies or retires.
You mightn't like the fact that abroad, Putin is massively unpopular -- especially because he is thin-skinned, mercurial, impulsive, surrounds himself with idiots and yes-men, and has a very sheltered world view. And it's overshadowed the fact that Russia was right about Syria, and was probably in the right in Crimea, which is a shame. Because if Putin wasn't such a massive dickhead, Russia could be a big force for good in the world.
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.
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.
" 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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
NOBODY in their right mind thinks the world is safer with a weak Russia.
Except people who view Russia in the light of history, and note that when they have too much military might, they tend to project it. The answer to an out-of-control USA ain't a strong Russia, it's to weaken the USA. Making more strong nations just leads to more conflicts and eventually wars.
Putin is a missed opportunity, in that he has the power and a mandate to turn Russia into a normal country, governed by the rule of law. Instead, we have a strong Russia, making a nuisance out of itself everywhere, instead of leading from the front.
Yes, just like every other nation which has amassed enough power to project it, ever.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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.
don't believe the propaganda, watch documentaries on youtube, komrade!
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.
And you believed that? HAHAHA. It was because they physically couldn't make complex, hardened CPUs. They worked with what they had. It's a testament to their brilliance, but not to their ability in war. Once you actually get to the point where you're producing microchips, they just keep getting cheaper the more you make. It does, however, cost a hell of a lot to get there in the first place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Small budget?
Well... it all depends on their priorities... Either it's "Make the best X we can with Y amount of money" or "Make the cheapest X we can for Y amount of money that we then can sell for Z amount of money so we can finance project Q"
The first option there is probably the best.. And the second part here is that they can probably ignore all the existing patents that covers all this and there by reducing per-unit cost with quite a bit.
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!
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
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!!!
Unless the elimination of the Pax Americana has the very undesirable effect of countries who have lived for decades under the protection of the US military decide to rearm because the countries that they fear have no check on expansion.
I propose that there is a happier middle ground which does not involve the USA playing the role of international bully, simply because it can.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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 ?
I Soviet Russia, computer chips program YOU.
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.
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
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.
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.
You should call that humorous "economics"...
That's okay, because economists disagree on cause and effect at the highest levels, as well as the lowest ones. Given that, a high school economics student (honors or not, let's just take "passing" as a given for the scope of this conversation) probably has at least as good a chance to get economics right as anyone else, and probably a lot better than most.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You've been drinking too much Russian kool-aid. Yes, they have great mechanical engineers, as witnesses in the advanced rocket engines, but we're talking about semiconductor manufacturing here (not even semiconductor design, which I'm sure they've historically been much better at than manufacturing). Regarding MiG-25, I think you're mistaken. What exactly was "nearly fully automated and computerized" about it? Was the radar built out of vacuum tubes? Yes! Was it strange for any RF engineer? Hell, no, why should it? Vacuum tubes have been great at high-powered microwave applications. They still are. They simply used vacuum tubes because they didn't have the semiconductors to do the job.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
I think that is the problem he was speaking of. Who can stop the US military from taking what it wants and paying the soldiers itself if the US collapses?
So which do you think is more likely to happen, the US military disbands and it's soldiers leave into a country that just failed and has no real support structure or opportunity for the soldier to gain employment or even food and clothing, or the military stays in place, starts taking what it wants from other countries, takes care of it's soldiers that way, and says screw the civilian government that just collapsed the country?
Does a crook care that you or I am in debt? Does he even care that he is in debt? How about when he is taking from you and I to support his debt?
This is the problem exactly. If the country collapsed, what is stopping the military from just taking what it wants from any other country out there? Surely not other military.
How about I write about how you are ignorant for letting your attempts to gloat hold any resemblance of intelligence back from being displayed. Seriously, is it that hard of a concept, world's largest and most powerful military all the sudden finds its civilian command structure collapsed and they just disband instead of taking the lead themselves? There were all sorts of contingency plans during the cold war for the military to operate independently of the US should a nuke take the government out of something. I'm not sure why they wouldn't still be around.
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.
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.
Without peace, there can be no freedom.
Right, that's why the size of America's standing military is injurious to freedom. It is not being used to secure peace, it is being used to secure profit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
No they need to compile all the apps. Guess what? There is a version gcc that compiles for arm.
How do you think the IOS and Android Apps came into being?
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/
You need to ask your "honors: high school economics teacher for newer book. China is the world's largest manufacturer. Just google it: http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/...
-Ted http://www.freemathhelp.com/
I recommend following my advice instead of making these guesses. They make you look rather foolish. You see, they had actual computers on board on vacuum tubes (plane was fly by wire with many automated controls due to extreme conditions it was designed to fly in - they list things like plane rolling and collapsing to the side and then into a downward dive without specific fly by wire programming when launching a missile for example) and it was designed in 1959 and flying in 1969. Not many complex microprocessors even in US back then, unless you know something I don't.
And the point is that that particular aircraft was indeed fully computerized and automated to the point where people could not believe that all that was coded to work on just vacuum tubes.
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