Friday, October 14th 2022
48-Core Russian Baikal-S Processor Die Shots Appear
In December of 2021, we covered the appearance of Russia's home-grown Baikal-S processor, which has 48 cores based on Arm Cortex-A75 cores. Today, thanks to the famous chip photographer Fritzchens Fritz, we have the first die shows that show us exactly how Baikal-S SoC is structured internally and what it is made up of. Manufactured on TSMC's 16 nm process, the Baikal-S BE-S1000 design features 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores running at a 2.0 GHz base and a 2.5 GHz boost frequency. With a TDP of 120 Watts, the design seems efficient, and the Russian company promises performance comparable to Intel Skylake Xeons or Zen1-based AMD EPYC processors. It also uses a home-grown RISC-V core for management and controlling secure boot sequences.
Below, you can see the die shots taken by Fritzchens Fritz and annotated details by Twitter user Locuza that marked the entire SoC. Besides the core clusters, we see that a slum of cache connects everything, with six 72-bit DDR4-3200 PHYs and memory controllers surrounding everything. This model features a pretty good selection of I/O for a server CPU, as there are five PCIe 4.0 x16 (4x4) interfaces, with three supporting CCIX 1.0. You can check out more pictures below and see the annotations for yourself.
Source:
Fritzchens Fritz (Flickr)
Below, you can see the die shots taken by Fritzchens Fritz and annotated details by Twitter user Locuza that marked the entire SoC. Besides the core clusters, we see that a slum of cache connects everything, with six 72-bit DDR4-3200 PHYs and memory controllers surrounding everything. This model features a pretty good selection of I/O for a server CPU, as there are five PCIe 4.0 x16 (4x4) interfaces, with three supporting CCIX 1.0. You can check out more pictures below and see the annotations for yourself.
52 Comments on 48-Core Russian Baikal-S Processor Die Shots Appear
ARM is UK patent, right?
From an Washington Post article dated 25th of February: "TSMC has suspended all sales to Russia and to third parties known to supply products to Russia while it sorts through the sanctions rules to ensure it fully complies, according to a person familiar with the company’s business, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters."
It's an old CPU obviously, but the chinese are close to 16nm anyway.
Good to see Chinese getting close to have better nodes, at least we'll have two sources so when one side gets the stupid pill we could relay on the other one.
And China has Duv 14nm sussed meanwhile the foundrie leaders are eyeing 3Nm so China's got a ways to go yet.
The design looks quite clean. Wonder what kind of performance this CPU has. I imagine they are using some Linux based OS to run it.
This is obviously server targeted CPU, probably for their web companies.
Wonder, if Chinese would make those CPUs for them, as it seems they have now 7nm possibility, without using EUVL approach that ASML sells.
It would be cool to gather the CPUs from all different countries and have some kind of benchmark run and see where is everyone standing.
Arm is UK company owned by Japanese trust (Softbank). By the way, Softbank is looking for a buyer for Arm. So, if you have some extra money . . . and not wearing leather jasket . . . ;-)
We tried trading, too. Russia chose to cut that line itself, too. The underlying principle was 'no sanctioning or shooting but trading'.
So while we are brainstorming, got a better solution other than trading, sanctions or shooting? Or maybe you prefer shooting :) In that case, what do you think economies will evolve to? Wealth and luxury?
As for China... Xi is not a guy that shares his cab with you, in case you havent noticed. Theyve invented a wild mix of opportunistic autocratic capitalism. If you want to see Cyberpunk, do register in their social credit system ;) They really are closest to a running beta for it right now. Less bugs than in the game and no heroes to save the day!
Also, nice avatar.More like current events made tech political. Then again this was inevitable, muxh like how tech companies operate in the political arena. Given the developments a whole lot more is going to get political. Anything scarce will be fought over, simple.
At the same time, Russians had good tech based on Vacuum tubes with similar performance as their US counterparts, but they foolishly though that it is the way to go and not semi-conductors.
So, they lost the battle there. After that, their only choice was to copy what was on the market. As did many other countries (what do you think, how Japan tech started?). And it takes years to clone someones tech. And at some point, things got so complex, that they can not do even that anymore.
Now, this chip is based on Arm, which would meant, they bought IP from them and have license for it (otherwise TSMC would not made them). So it is not a rip off, just using off the shelf technology.
So, there is nothing dishonest about this chip.
As a tech enthusiast, I like to read these kind of articles as this is widening my perspective on IT world. World I felt in love in 1984. And loved it still with the same passion.