Russia boots up Baikal-S processor, powers government infrastructure

Russian company Baikal Electronics has officially fired up its new Baikal-S processor, which has 48 cores based on the Arm Instruction Set Architecture (ISA).

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The CPU is codenamed "BE-S1000" and has its 48 cores at 2.0GHz base frequency, with boost clocks reaching 2.5GHz -- all within a 120W TDP. You can use up to 4 x sockets in a server board, offering a home-grown RISC-V processor for safe boot and management, with the entire SoC being controlled by a custom design.

In some of its own benchmark data, Baikal Electronics has the performance of its new Baikal-S in SPEC2006 CPU Integer, Coremark, Whetstone, 7Zip, and HPLinkpack. The new Baikal-S is compared against -- and keeps up with -- the Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Skylake design, and the AMD EPYC 7351 CPU which is based on the original Zen 1 core.

• Read more: Russia to use local CPUs in its government PCs, ditches US-made chips
• Read more: Russia has started making its own AMD B450 motherboards

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Up against Huawei's Kunpeng 920, the new Baikal-S offers 0.86x the performance -- but next year, in 2022 we'll see the company make 10,000 x BE-S1000 SoCs and 30,000 of them in 2023. It's not going to break any records and see AMD, NVIDIA, or Intel losing any sleep at night.

But, it's another player -- in Russia -- making silicon. These new chips will be used to power the Russian government infrastructure, something that I wrote about a number of years ago... and now that is finally happening. The idea was born from Russia wanting to build its own processors, so that it knew there were no nasty backdoors by the US and China.

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