The chip designer Baikal Electronics from Russia received the first batch of commercial Baikal-M system-on-chips from its manufacturing partner TSMC. SoC will enable Baikal’s iRU and other partners to start producing “all-Russian” PCs, but the number of chips that Baikal can purchase from TSMC will make it difficult for such computers to compete with x86-based systems in number.
Baikal Electronics got 5000 this week Baikal-M (BE-M1000) SoC from TSMC, report News CenterAccording to the company, the “package” weighs 55 kilograms (which means that each SoC weighs 13.2 grams), which is a new way to quantify semiconductors. Due to global chip shortages and TSMC’s high utilization rate, shipments were delayed by about four months. At the same time, the company expects to obtain 10,000 to 15,000 SoCs per month starting early next year.
Baikal Electronics CEO Andrey Evdokimov said in an interview: “We expect that the entire supply chain will start to operate at full capacity from January to February-10-15,000 units per month. chip.” News Center. Establishing large-scale production is a complex task. We have invested a lot of money in this area to ensure the stability of supply and minimize the risks in all stages of production. ”
The head of Baikal Electronics declined to say which companies will get Baikal-M SoC first, but there is at least one Russian PC manufacturer Announce As early as August, computers powered by SoCs began mass production. The company advertises these systems as “all-Russian” computers, using hardware and software designed in Russia. But the memory, SSD, HDD and other components are neither designed nor produced in Russia.
10,000 – 15,000 Baikal-M SoC per month does not seem to be an important number. However, it should be remembered that these processors will power some entry-level systems used by governments and state-owned companies and organizations for general workloads that do not require high performance.
According to today’s standards, Baikal-M1 is not a real powerhouse. The SoC contains eight rather outdated Arm Cortex-A57 cores (first appeared in commercial products in 2015), running at 1.50 GHz, and equipped with 8MB L3 cache. The SoC also has an eight-cluster Arm Mali-T628 GPU with two display pipelines, a dual-channel DDR3/DDR4 controller, and supports six USB 2.0/3.0 ports (four USB 2.0, two USB 3.0), 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes (x8, x4, x4), two GbE ports, and two 10GbE ports.
Although its configuration and functions are quite mediocre, the 28nm Baikal-M’s TDP is as high as 35W, which is okay for mainstream desktops and entry-level laptops, but these SoCs are excluded from various stylish PC designs and various minicomputers Outside-factor edge application.
