The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has brought about a series of sanctions, which are very restrictive. Technology companies such as Intel, AMD, Apple or NVIDIA, among others, have stopped supplying products to Russia. Well, new ones have been released. restrictions on Russiain this case regarding chips.
These new sanctions are not only for Russia, they are also for Belarus. There are two reasons. The first, that they have been helping Russia in the invasion of its Ukrainian neighbors. In addition, they believe that they could help acquire technological products and send them to Russia, bypassing the restrictions.
Russia suffers strong restrictions on the purchase and import of chips
The sanctions and restrictions on the list are quite harsh, so much so that they make Russia goes back to the 70s and 80s technologically. Although it may seem strange, it involves applying a series of restrictions and blockades approved by the United States and 33 other countries, which was signed in 1996. Dual-use goods and technologies are blocked, as well as 22 categories of military supplies and technologies.
Among these new measures, the following stand out:
- The bandwidth of the arithmetic-logical units may not exceed the 16 bit
- Can’t beat a 5 GFlops performance (5 billion calculations per second). We must bear in mind that modern graphics cards are capable of offering several TFlops of power.
- The clock rate of the chips not being able to overcome the 25MHz
- The number of data busesinstruction buses, and serial communication ports that connect to the processor, and the speed may not exceed 2.5MB/s
- is limited to 144 the number of pins of the chips
- The transmission delays of basic gates shall not exceed 0.4 nanoseconds
- Impossibility of acquiring equipment and wafer manufacturing technology by optical or x-ray photography
Basically, it’s going back to the days of the first computers, practically. A series of harsh restrictions that must be respected by all companies based in the countries that have signed the treaty.
Logically, one door remains open for Russia and that is to buy computer equipment from China, its neighbors with whom it has extensive trade relations.
Profile position by China
Throughout the conflict, we have seen how the Asian giant has kept a low profile on this matter. They have avoided speaking out and have always measured their words very well when referring to the Russian invasion. The reason is the close ties between the two countries and their trade relations.
Remember that Russia has expelled Telegram from the country for refusing to grant a backdoor to spy on conversations indiscriminately. They have also opted to use free software and invest in developing their own software and applications. As if that were not enough, the Russians hire the best hackers in the world to spy on their enemies and dissidents.
It has even been commented that Russia was preparing an internet blackout in the purest Chinese style. Although it has not been fully carried out, important restrictions have been implemented to access the internet in recent years.
