Baikal-L

2025: ICL begins developing laptop powered by new Russian Baikal-L processor

ICL has planned to enter the market with products on a Russian processor. This was announced at the annual ICL Partner Connect forum at the end of April 2025 by the general director of ICL Group of Companies and the computer manufacturer ICL Techno Evgeny Stepanov. "Today we are already designing motherboards for a Russian processor," he said in his speech. As explained by TAdviser Evgeny Stepanov, it is planned to produce laptops and tablets on Russian processors. At the initial stage, we are talking about using the Baikal-L processor. Read more here.

2021: Raising 9.44 billion rubles for Baikal-L and Baikal-S2

On November 16, 2021, it became known about the allocation of two state subsidies to Baikal Electronics in the amount of 9.44 billion rubles for the creation of two new processors: Baikal-L and Baikal-S2.

As the company told CNews, the funds were provided by the Ministry of Industry and Trade following the results of the thematic competitive selection of projects for creating an electronic component base and modules for reimbursing the state for part of the costs of their implementation in September 2021.

Baikal Electronics received 9.44 billion rubles from the Ministry of Industry and Trade for the development of new processors

The ministry allocated 3.8 billion rubles for the development of the new Baikal-L processor (12 nm process technology, ARMv9 architecture). Its first engineering samples are due in 2023. It is planned that this processor will be used in Russian laptops for government agencies and education as part of import substitution.

Among other things, it is planned to create a high-performance enterprise-class laptop based on Baikal-L. From what is now on the market, the LenovoThinkPadL13 on the IntelCorei7 is called an analogue. Also on the new Baikal, it is planned to create a laptop for everyday use by ordinary personnel. In this case, the HPProBook 440 G7 on the Intel Core i3 is called an analogue.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade allocated 5.64 billion rubles for the Baikal-S2 chip (6 nm, ARMv9). This chip is planned to be used in data centers for cloud computing. It is assumed that the first batches of the processor will be ready by 2025.

In a conversation with CNews, the co-owner of the Varton group, the shareholder of its member Baikal Electronics and the general director of the Astra Linux group (also part of Varton) Ilya Sivtsev called Baikal-S2 an ambitious world-class project. The chip should become competitive, its market value will be "no higher than foreign counterparts," he said and added that the largest Russian IT companies have already become interested in the project.^[1]

Notes