The company’s latest design, the S1000, is a 48-core server processor designed by Baikal Electronics, a Russian chip designer, which was recently revealed by techspot.
Over the past years, Russia’s semiconductor industry has been very dependent on foreign technology. According to the United Nations Comtrade database, Russia imported $440 million in semiconductor equipment and $1.25 billion in chips in 2020, with related semiconductor imports coming mainly from Asian countries that do not have sanctions imposed on them.
In fact, before the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Russia has been actively developing its own semiconductor industry, of which the more well-known Russian chip design manufacturer is Baikal Electronics.
Baikal Electronics had previously designed chips based on the MIPS instruction set (Baikal-T series), and in recent years, has fully shifted to the Arm architecture, including the Baikal-M, Baikal-S, and Baikal-L series, all of which are processor chips based on the Arm architecture.
In 2021, Baikal Electronics launched the Baikal-M series processors for mass production shipments.
This chip is based on TSMC 28nm process foundry, 8-core Cortex-A57 architecture, frequency up to 1.5GHz, integrated Mali-T628 MP8 GPU core, frequency 750MHz, also supports dual-channel DDR4-2400 or DDR3-1600 memory, power consumption does not exceed 35W.
According to the latest exposure, before the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in February this year, Baikal Electronics designed a new generation of 48-core processor S1000 has been completed, and in the United States and its allies on Russia before further sanctions from TSMC received a small number of S1000 chip prototypes, which also seems to surface the chip flow success.
According to the report, Baikal Electronics S1000 is a processor designed for server applications, based on TSMC 16FFC process manufacturing, area of 607mm2, with 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores, 2GHz and 120W TDP.
There are 12 compute clusters on this SoC, each containing four cores and four 512 KB L3 cache blocks. Each core contains its own 512 KB L2 cache and two 64 KB L1 cache blocks.
In the middle of the SoC is a four-by-four grid of 2 MB L4 cache blocks for a total of 32 MB. In addition, there are 24 MB of L3 and L2 cache and 6 MB of L1 cache on the SoC: a total of 86 MB, shared by 48 cores.
On the periphery of the SoC are the I/O controllers. The left and right sides house five PCIe 4.0 x16 controllers, three of which can double as CCIX 1.0 modules with 2-way and 4-way SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) enabled.
On the top and bottom are six memory controllers, each of which can handle one 72-bit channel up to 128GB – 768GB DDR4-3200 with ECC.
According to the specifications of Baikal Electronics’ S1000 series processors exposed on Twitter on October 14, comparing the S1000 with the 20-core Intel Xeon Gold 6148, 16-core AMD Epyc 7351 and 48-core Huawei Kunpeng 920, the performance of the S1000 is approximately It is comparable to AMD and Intel CPUs, and it also reaches 85% of the SoC of the 7nm process Huawei Kunpeng 920.
According to the specifications of Baikal Electronics’ S1000 series processors exposed on Twitter on October 14, comparing the S1000 with the 20-core Intel Xeon Gold 6148, 16-core AMD Epyc 7351 and 48-core Huawei Kunpeng 920, the performance of the S1000 is approximately. It is comparable to AMD and Intel CPUs, and it also reaches 85% of the SoC of the 7nm process Huawei Kunpeng 920.
According to Baikal Electronics’ plans, its S1000 chip appears to be planning to enter the Russian market this year or next.
However, the U.S. Department of Commerce has imposed sanctions on Russia, embargoing technologies and products including semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, information security equipment, lasers and sensors. Since then, the European Union, Taiwan and other regions have also followed up on Russia with sanctions. This has also caused wafer foundries such as Intel, TSMC, and Samsung to stop providing foundry services to Russian-related chip design companies. This also means that the Baikal Electronics S1000 processor will not be manufactured.
Although there are two integrated circuit manufacturers in Russia: Микрон (Mikron) and Ангстрем, both of them are relatively backward in technology.
Микрон can only provide 65-250 nanometer process technology, and Ангстрем (bankrupt and reorganized in 2019) has only one 8-inch fab, which can provide 90-250 nanometer process technology, mainly providing military, aerospace and industrial products.
Moreover, Mikron has also been placed on the sanctions list by the U.S. Treasury Department.
In addition, in May this year, the United Kingdom also added two major Russian processor manufacturers, MCST and Baikal Electronics, to the sanctions list. In addition to freezing their assets, the technical services provided by British companies will also be strictly regulated. This move means that Russian chip design companies may not be able to use Arm’s IP to design processors.
Although relevant sources said that the design and production licenses of all processors below Baikal Electronics’ 16nm process are still available, new Arm IP licenses will no longer be available for processors under development.
Under the dual constraints of chip design and manufacturing, Baikal Electronics has a bleak future.
Although Russia plans to invest about 3.19 trillion rubles (about 38.43 billion U.S. dollars) by 2030 in order to develop its local semiconductor manufacturing industry recently, it hopes to mass-produce the localized 90nm process by the end of 2022 and the localized 28nm process by the end of 2030.
However, under the joint sanctions of the United States and its allies, it may be very difficult to achieve this goal.
