Treasury buys RISC servers worth 780 million rubles to work with foreign software

At the end of January 2022, the Federal Treasury announced a tender for the purchase of servers with processors on the RISC architecture (reduced instruction set computer) for 780 million rubles. According to Kommersant, citing public procurement materials, the supplied equipment should support the migration of software-independent sections operating on existing RISC Yadro P1-70A servers, and be compatible with the management console of RISC Yadro P1-70A servers installed at customers.

A feature of the RISC architecture is that performance increases due to simplified instructions. It formed the basis of the open architecture of RISC-V. The technology can be used freely and free of charge, including for commercial implementation.

Treasury buys RISC servers worth 780 million rubles to work with foreign software

According to Oleg Izumrudov, director of the Consortium of Domestic Storage System Developers, all the main manufacturers of transaction software, which are used by financial institutions around the world, directly or indirectly belong to IBM. To combat import substitution, the American vendor created a consortium of OpenPower, the expert explains.

With the help of its participants, IBM sells products in countries where government agencies cannot purchase foreign equipment as part of import substitution. In fact, Yadro products based on Open Power are products based on IBM processors twenty years ago, "said Emerald.

Leading CorpSoft24 engineer Mikhail Sergeyev says that by February 2022, almost all software is written under Intel and AMD processors. To work with the RISC architecture, the software must be recompiled or rewritten precisely for it, he added. Among the advantages of RISC architecture, Sergeyev called the price, performance, as well as the fact that it supports almost any Linux distribution.^[1]

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