Processors are not only designed in the countries of the orbit of the United States, but also in other parts of the world such as Mother Russia, since semiconductors are too important a strategic piece for Americans to share their secrets with their veteran enemy, which does not mean that new CPUs are not designed in Russia.
In any case, it must be taken into account that the designs of the chips in that country do not reach the technological level of the large companies such as Intel, NVIDIA or AMD, which have the ability to carry out Full Custom designs where it and the node of Manufacturing go hand in hand, and they also have to draw on elements already known and previously designed to develop their processors.
Baikal BE-S1000X, the Russian 48-core CPU
For some time now, the ISA ARM has evolved from smartphones to the server market to stand up to Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC. We have known cases like Nuvia, Ampere, internal designs made in companies like Amazon and Alibaba, and so on. In the present case, we are going to talk about Baikal-S. A processor financed by the Russian state and developed by the Baikal company.
The name of the CPU is BE-S1000X and it consists of 48 ARM Cortex A75 2 GHz cores, but with the ability to reach the 2.5 GHz clock speed, all under a 120 watt TDP. This part has not been developed by the Russian company, since we are talking about a core designed by ARM Holdings and licensed. In reality, very few companies today have the ability to make a CPU core from scratch due to the enormous complexity involved, which is why NVIDIA’s attempt to purchase ARM was so controversial.
Although the ARM cores are not the only part of the BE-S1000X, but Baikal has developed a custom coprocessor that handles security and booting, based on ISA RISC-V. Let’s not forget that while ARM licenses complete pieces of hardware other than ISA, RISC-V does not, so the BE-S1000X engineers have had to develop that part of the processor from scratch.
What is its performance?
Obviously, we will not be able to install this CPU in our PCs, but it will go to servers placed in strategic places, but the existence of the BE-S1000X allows Russia to be less dependent on technology developed in the United States.
According to the BE-S1000X designers, its performance is equivalent to an Intel Xeon Gold 6148 with 16-core SkyLake architecture. They also compare it to an AMD EPYC 7351, also 16-core and based on the first-generation Zen architecture. Seen like this, it does not seem so impressive, however, it is what we said at the beginning of this article, it is the suspicion in the United States that is making rival countries in geopolitics have to develop their own processors.
