Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.