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Released: First PC Based On Russia's Homegrown "Baikal" Processor (t-platforms.ru)
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.)
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.
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.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
They built it to be used in government offices and companies. There is a suspicion in those parts that western CPUs are programmed on low level to record the information and send it periodically to a central server.
Yes, it's probably a dated design and all, and bluntly I don't care about the chip itself. I wonder WHY.
Why is Russia making its own chips when computer chips are cheap and plentiful? It's way cheaper to simply buy a few. Why bother rolling your own? Well, there are exactly two reason why I would make my own hardware. One, I don't trust the existing manufacturers to not include backdoors and kill switches. This is what I hope the reason for doing it is.
Two, because they may not be available anymore when the country they're made in is no longer friendly to mine. This is what I kinda fear the reason could be.
We're not going to head for war, but I could see the international climate getting frostier in the near future.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Shebang is under Linux management. Can have LibreOffice + FireFox + many other programs. It can act as thin client. It's compatible with some GOST standards of encryption(similar standard to ISO in EU) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It has capability of connecting specific Russia manufactured USB devices used for encryption. It has 2 ethernet ports, 21,5' Display, 2-8 Gigs of RAM, 4 USB2.0 ports, has opportunity to connect SSD and memory cards(card reader I guess),