Russian Baikal-S Processor With 48 Arm-Based Cores Boots Up, Uses RISC-V Coprocessor for Safe Boot and Management

[AleksandarK]

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.


View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[ixi]

Russians back in business, not bad, not bad. Now we know where Ivan was hiding all these years!

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...

 

[Vayra86]

I heard you need mount the cooling on this baby with a sledgehammer.

If it gives errors later down the line, same treatment.

 

[Bomby569]

This (i don't mean this specific cpu or russia) may finally end the Intel/AMD duopoly, and i think it's great.

 

[LTUGamer]

This (i don't mean this specific cpu or russia) may finally end the Intel/AMD duopoly, and i think it's great.

This is ARM based CPU. And I think that implementation of ARM architecture is much easier than create whole new CPU

 

[Dux]

Russian processor blyats up.

 

[Bomby569]

This is ARM based CPU. And I think that implementation of ARM architecture is much easier than create whole new CPU

It would never be x86 or x64 (again duopoly) so that is just pointing out the obvious.

 

[Caring1]

Russian processor blyats up.

Only the drivers do

 

[ncrs]

This (i don't mean this specific cpu or russia) may finally end the Intel/AMD duopoly, and i think it's great.

It's just an old SoC design using a core from 2017. They even compare it to Skylake and Zen 1, and not anything newer. It's a start, I guess...
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.

 

[Bomby569]

It's just an old SoC design using a core from 2017. They even compare it to Skylake and Zen 1, and not anything newer. It's a start, I guess...
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.

Sure, it's a bit comparable to the Chinese try, but that's not the most important to get from this. The fact that there are so many people trying it it's amazing. And don't forget Russia always had good scientists in the past, idk how it is today or if they can afford them.

 

[ncrs]

Sure, it's a bit comparable to the Chinese try, but that's not the most important to get from this. The fact that there are so many people trying it it's amazing. And don't forget Russia always had good scientists in the past, idk how it is today or if they can afford them.

Just this announcement doesn't provide enough to make it comparable to the Kunpeng. You have to consider that they have created an entire server platform for that chip going from BMC through SSD and 100G+ NIC up to 32-socket node interconnects. They have a complete, DC-level platform with a roadmap going quite far ahead (however they are behind on it due to political issues).
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

 

[zlobby]

Huawei dropped their plans for ARM based CPU for carrier and enterprise. I wonder why?

 

[ncrs]

Huawei dropped their plans for ARM based CPU for carrier and enterprise. I wonder why?

US Sanctions Forcing Huawei to End ARM Chip Production

 

[Easo]

Last I remember Baikals are still actually made by TSMC...

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

"so you want to be a spy..."

 

[ncrs]

Last I remember Baikals are still actually made by TSMC...

Yes, but with older process nodes. This one is made on 16FFC.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Always good to see progress made on any ends.

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.

 

[Vayra86]

Always good to see progress made on any ends.

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.

It just happens man

 

[zlobby]

US Sanctions Forcing Huawei to End ARM Chip Production

Sike! I was not aware of that.

 

[Bomby569]

Just this announcement doesn't provide enough to make it comparable to the Kunpeng. You have to consider that they have created an entire server platform for that chip going from BMC through SSD and 100G+ NIC up to 32-socket node interconnects. They have a complete, DC-level platform with a roadmap going quite far ahead (however they are behind on it due to political issues).
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

The Chinese have a big advantage, would be unfair to compare progress at that level.

 

[londiste]

A75. I do have to wonder if they have the capacity to find and analyze possible backdoors in a modern ARM CPU core design.
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.

 

[Frank_100]

Open Power?

 

[Arumio]

It just happens man

this... more like Gypsy style

 

[Deepblue08]

Russian chips, American chips...THEY ARE ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!