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Released: First PC Based On Russia's Homegrown "Baikal" Processor (t-platforms.ru)

Posted by timothy on from the shoot-reliably-even-in-rough-conditions dept.

WheatGrass writes to note that the company T-Platforms has introduced the first mass production unit based upon the Russian Baikal-T1 processor, mentioned here last in 2014. The new Baikal-based workstation is called the "Meadowsweet terminal," according to T-Platform's official website; the feature list says it's running a Debian-based Linux distro. "Congratulations, Russia," Says WheatGrass. (According to Google's translation of this Russian-language story at RG.RU Digital, "[Y]ou can install many conventional applications, such as the LibreOffice office suite, Firefox web browser, and so on, the developers say," but the main use seems to be as a thin client.)

5 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Russian? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's a MIPS CPU, built by TSMC.

    I assume there were some Russians involved in the design. But that's true of all major CPUs too.

    1. Re:Russian? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, I looked it up and Baikal Electronics purchased a license for the MIPS instruction set. From there, they implemented the instruction set on their own. It's not their first chip, so I assume the used their own I/O designs from other chips. It is a Russian chip. TSMC is just a foundry. Do you make a big deal about what kind of printer people use to print papers?

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      Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    2. Re:Russian? by slashping · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you give somebody a low level chip design, rather than the source code, it would be very hard for them to add a backdoor.

  2. Low-end MIPS processor by AaronW · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's basically a low-end MIPS 32-bit processor. You can basically get everything that's in the chip as off-the-shelf cores. MIPS is popular because it's quite a bit cheaper to license than ARM. I'm surprised they didn't go with a 64-bit MIPS core since it's been available for a very long time.

    Once nice thing about MIPS is that it's very easy to add your own instructions to it via coprocessor 2. My employer has used COP2 to add a lot of encryption and hashing instructions to their MIPS cores. ARM does not allow you to add your own instructions. The only thing that's mildly interesting is the 10G Ethernet support, but then that will be limited by the 32-bit MIPS. I'm not sure if it's a cache-coherent core but my guess is that it's not, which adds significant overhead in my experience since every buffer must be invalidated when it's received and flushed when transmitted. In MIPS this is done by issuing CACHE instructions for every cache line used in the buffer.

    Since it lacks a decent sized L2 cache the performance is going to suck.

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    This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
    1. Re:Low-end MIPS processor by slashping · · Score: 1, Informative

      USB is good enough, and doesn't require a special connector. And the complexity of the interface is a solved issue.