Monday, December 20th 2021
Russian Baikal-S Processor With 48 Arm-Based Cores Boots Up, Uses RISC-V Coprocessor for Safe Boot and Management
In recent years, government institutions have been funding the development of home-grown hardware that will power the government infrastructure. This trend was born out of a desire to design chips with no back doors implemented so that no foreign body could monitor the government's processes. Today, Russian company Baikal Electronics managed to boot up the Baikal-S processor with 48 cores based on Arm Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The processor codenamed BE-S1000 manages to operate 48 cores at a 2.0 GHz base frequency, with a maximum boost of 2.5 GHz clock speed. All of that is achieved at the TDP of 120 Watts, making this design very efficient.
When it comes to some server configurations, the Baikal-S processor run in up to four sockets in a server board. It offers a home-grown RISC-V processor for safe boot and management, so the entire SoC is controlled by a custom design. Baikal Electronics provided some benchmark numbers, which you can see in the slides below. They cover SPEC2006 CPU Integer, Coremark, Whetstone, 7Zip, and HPLinkpack performance. Additionally, the company claims that Baikal-S is in line with Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Skylake design and AMD EPYC 7351 CPU based on Zen1 core. Compared to Huawei's Kunpeng 920, the Baikal-S design provides 0.86x performance.
In 2022, the company plans to produce 10,000 BE-S1000 SoCs and 30,000 of them in 2023. While this may not seem like a lot, we don't know what capacity is Baikal Electronics working with. So for more details, we have to wait.
Source:
Dmitrii Kuznetsov (Twitter)
When it comes to some server configurations, the Baikal-S processor run in up to four sockets in a server board. It offers a home-grown RISC-V processor for safe boot and management, so the entire SoC is controlled by a custom design. Baikal Electronics provided some benchmark numbers, which you can see in the slides below. They cover SPEC2006 CPU Integer, Coremark, Whetstone, 7Zip, and HPLinkpack performance. Additionally, the company claims that Baikal-S is in line with Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Skylake design and AMD EPYC 7351 CPU based on Zen1 core. Compared to Huawei's Kunpeng 920, the Baikal-S design provides 0.86x performance.
23 Comments on Russian Baikal-S Processor With 48 Arm-Based Cores Boots Up, Uses RISC-V Coprocessor for Safe Boot and Management
Maybe in future Russians are gonna make cpu's for normal person as well, that would be cool. We do need more competitors than just Intel and AMD. Support on the other hand... :D
If it gives errors later down the line, same treatment.
We've had way better designs available for a while, for example Ampere Altra with 80/128 custom cores based on ARM Neoverse N1 (which is 2 generations newer than the A75 used here) or Annapurna (Amazon) Graviton. The latter launched their third iteration recently that supports Armv9 and DDR5, sadly with some details still unknown and being locked to AWS.
Don't get me wrong, it's good that we're getting more players, but this particular one is obsolete out of the gate, and with limited production capacity it most likely won't be available for purchase by mere mortals ;)
I think there is something slightly wrong with me, though. Once I read the word "Russian", every post here that I read through in here was in a bad Russian accent in my head, then again it also might not be helping that I played through some Metro games the past week.
Comparisons against Xeon are cool while it is INT load - more than double the cores obviously help - but falls quite short when it comes to FP.