IRU, a major PC manufacturer from Russia, has begun mass production of systems based on key domestic components. Including Baikal-M System-on-chip, Motherboard and Linux-based operating system. These systems are not proud of high performance, but are mainly designed for office workloads of various government agencies and government-controlled companies.
iRU’s PC lineup based on the Baikal-M platform includes 23.8-inch all-in-one computers, ordinary desktops and thin clients. The company Announce On its website (via Register). These PCs are powered by Baikal-M SoC and can be equipped with up to 32GB of DDR4 memory, up to 1TB of SSD and up to 3TB of HDD. The manufacturer installed Astra Linux, Alt OS, Red OS and other operating systems as well as software designed in Russia.
This Baikal-M1 System on Chip Baikal Electronics designed and integrated eight rather outdated Arm Cortex-A57 cores, running at 1.50 GHz, and equipped with 8MB of L3 CacheThe SoC also includes an eight-cluster Arm Mali-T628 GPU. SoC has six USB 2.0/3.0 ports (four USB 2.0, two USB 3.0), 16 PCIe 3.0 channels, two GbE ports, and two 10GbE ports. The SoC is manufactured using TSMC’s 28nm manufacturing process, with a TDP of 35W.
By today’s standards, the Baikal-M1 is not very powerful. Arm’s Cortex-A57 was unveiled in 2012 and was first used in a commercial SoC in 2015. AMD uses the Cortex-A57 core for its never-popular eight-core Opteron A1100, while Nvidia uses A57 in its Shield TV. Qualcomm also uses this core for its Snapdragon 810, which is another not-so-good chip, partly because it uses TSMC’s 20nm node.
For several years, Russia has been trying to migrate personal computers and servers used by government agencies and state-owned enterprises from processors and software developed in the United States and Europe. Although some organizations have adopted systems with domestic hardware and software, those organizations that require high performance and compatibility with the latest programs still use Windows or Linux-based PCs with built-in AMD or Intel processors.
In fact, the iRU system is not the first batch of PCs based on Baikal-M, but the first batch of mass-produced PCs. So far, Baikal-M-powered computers have not gained considerable market share in Russia. Although IRU’s Baikal-M-based machines can provide sufficient performance for basic applications, they will not be able to compete with customers who need higher performance than high-end smartphones in the 2015-2016 era.
