Baikal-S

2022: Cancellation of Baikal-S server processors due to TSMC failure to produce them

As it became known on June 16, 2022, Baikal Electronics"" canceled the release of Baikal-S server processors due to the refusal to TSMC produce them. In addition, batches of already released chips for personal computers Baikal-M also do not arrive in the Russian Federation, writes "."Kommersant

As the top manager of one of the specialized enterprises told the publication, problems with access to production facilities and foreign intellectual property make deliveries unreliable and putting such a processor into the development of new computers is too risky.

Baikal Electronics canceled the release of Baikal-S server processors due to TSMC's refusal to produce them

Director of Promobit (produces servers and Bitblaze DSS based on Elbrus processors) Maxim Koposov indicated that the cancellation of Baikal-S will lead to a return to foreign chips in the near future.

First of all, the market will be filled with the world's most massively produced processors from Intel and AMD, imported through parallel import channels, as well as Chinese products, he explained.

Ivan Pokrovsky, executive director of the Association of Russian Developers and Manufacturers of Electronics, believes that one of the sources of publication in the domestic electronics market knows that Baikal-S, even at the stage of the signal party, has interested a number of large consumers, including Sberbank.

According to market participants, Baikal Electronics may also abandon the production of the next generation of Baikal-S2 server processors, for the development of which the company received 5.64 billion rubles from the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Baikal Electronics told the newspaper that by mid-June 2022, "the team continues to work on all projects, including Baikal-S, Baikal-S2."

The founder of the SPC, Yaroslav Petrichkovich, believes that the cancellation of Baikal-S processors will not hit hard in terms of computer sales, since chips from Baikal Electronics and Elvis SPC existed only in experimental batches.^[1]

2021: Server Processor Announcement

In mid-December 2021, Baikal Electronics presented its first Baikal-S server processor in Moscow. The starting batch of new items has already arrived in Russia - the capacities of the Taiwanese TSMC are used for contract production.

In October 2021, the first Baikal-S engineering batch was released in the amount of 50 pieces. It is expected that another 600 processors will arrive in the first quarter of 2022, and by the end of the third quarter the manufacturer intends to build a scheme for the supply of these chips in industrial batches.

Baikal Electronics presented its first server processor Baikal-S

According to the general director of Baikal Electronics Andrei Evdokimov, for the first time the company can say that the processor is competitive in terms of price/performance ratio with foreign counterparts. Evdokimov says that in 2022 the company expects to begin serial deliveries of server solutions on the Baikal-S platform.

The Baikal-S processor is designed using a 16-nanometer process technology, has 48 ARM Cortex-A75 cores, six DDR4 3200 MHz memory channels - up to 768 GB per socket (128 GB per channel), cache: L1 - 64 KB instruction cache and data cache, L2 - 512 KB per core, L3 - 2 MB per cluster, L4 - 32 MB.

In the Coremark, Whetstone, 7zip benchmark benchmarks, the domestic processor showed performance superior to the Intel Xeon Gold 6148. At the same time, according to the developers, Baikal-S worked at a frequency of 2 GHz, Intel Xeon - 2.4 GHz.

Baikal Electronics calls the novelty the first Russian server processor with support for hardware virtualization (competitors have only a container processor). Baikal-S is designed for use in servers, storage systems, as well as in hyperconverged and supercomputer systems. The estimated price of one Baikal-S will be $3 thousand.^[2]

2019: Baikal-S server processor to be delayed by at least 1.5 years

server processor Baikal-S, which has been in development since October 2016, will not be released until a year and a half after state the deadline for its creation, it said CNews on November 26, 2019. This follows from the comparison of the data contract of the company (Baikal Electronics chip developer Ministry of Industry and Trade) with the statements of its CEO. He Andrey Evdokimov accepted the project in May 2019 from the company that resigned from the company, Mikhail Makhson which in the status of CEO led it from November 2016 for 2.5 years.

Under the terms of the aforementioned agreement, signed in October 2016, Baikal Electronics was provided from the Ministry of Industry and Trade with a subsidy in the maximum amount of 1.2 billion rubles. This money was invested in the project "Development and implementation of a domestic energy efficient microprocessor for server solutions" (the aforementioned "Baikal-S"). The total cost of the project is spelled out at 2.49 billion rubles. Thus, 1.29 billion rubles. the developer himself was supposed to invest in it. The project end date is November 30, 2019.

The deadlines, of course, have shifted, but I hope that by the end of 2020 we will already launch Baikal-S into production, "Evdokimov said. - Next fall, he will go to TSMC (Taiwanese chip factory; - approx. CNews), respectively, we will get it by the end of 2020, the beginning of 2021.

Taking into account the fact that according to the project implementation schedule approved by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, prototypes of the processor should have appeared before May 31, 2019, the release of the chip is postponed for at least 18-19 months. Since this is only part of the project, the schedule for the rest of its stages during the normal development of events took another six months. Therefore, it is assumed that the execution of the contract as a whole can end only in mid-2021.

Andrei Evdokimov sees several reasons for the delay in the project.

Firstly, the product we are developing is completely unique for Russian microelectronics; no one had done this before, so many things had to be studied, understood and determined for themselves directly in the process of work, "he said. - Secondly, during the work on the processor in the world microelectronics, there were major changes that forced us to critically revise the technical requirements in terms of performance and functional filling of the processor in order to make it more competitive. As a result, the processor turned out to be much more complicated than originally planned, using new generation cores, using a fundamentally new system bus and high-speed fourth generation peripheral interfaces.[3]

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