The concept of technological independence is not easy to develop, but some of the world's most important governments have decided to accept the challenge to adapt their infrastructure in the medium and long term. We have previously discussed China's interest in creating national processors, but this time we travel to Russia, where we find the new Baikal-S from Baikal Electronics. This is an ARM processor with 48 cores, a maximum frequency of 2.5 GHz, and a TDP of only 120 watts, which highlights its apparent efficiency.
Many believe that the Intel/AMD duopoly is bad for the industry, and some governments are at the top of the list. Suspicion of backdoors in Western silicon remains as strong as ever, and there is never a lack of commercial sanctions that prohibit the import of resources or the arrival of certain processors in different territories. The most recent scandal with these characteristics splashed Intel, which announced a block on the use of goods and/or services from Xinjiang (in response to the Chinese government's mistreatment of the Uyghur minority)... only to regret it in record time. China represents 25 percent of Intel's international revenue.
So... politics. There are many economic reasons for a country to develop silicon, but the political factor should not be taken lightly. With that in mind, we travel to Russia, and to the company Baikal Electronics, which announced the launch of its new Baikal-S processor. Its code name is BE-S1000, and it is making noise in the media thanks to its 48 ARM Cortex-A75 cores.
Baikal-S: 48 ARM cores for B2B applications
The available information tells us about a chip with 48 Cortex-A75 cores operating at a base frequency of 2.0 GHz, and a Turbo mode that rises to 2.5 GHz. It includes a RISC-V coprocessor for management and safe boot operations, so the complete chip is controlled with a custom design. We also note that a server can accept up to four of these processors, each within a thermal envelope of 120 watts. The official page suggests that the Baikal-S has been designed for servers, storage, and high-performance systems in the B2B or business-to-business segment.
As if that were not enough, the company shared some benchmarks, based on PEC2006, Coremark, Whetstone, 7-Zip, and HPLinpack. The numbers place the Baikal-S at levels similar to the Intel Xeon Gold 6148 (Skylake, 2017) and the AMD EPYC 7351 (Zen 1, 2017), while it is equivalent to 0.85x of the Huawei Kunpeng 920 (which the Chinese giant offers on a normal motherboard) under the same number of cores. Baikal Electronics plans to manufacture 10,000 chips in 2022, and raise its production to 30,000 units in 2023.
Official site: Click here
Source: TechPowerUp
