Russian 48-core ARM processor Baikal-S came out successful
In recent years, government agencies around the world have been funding local companies to develop chips to provide power for government equipment, and Russia is no exception. Baikal Electronics is the most famous processor design company in Russia, using Arm or MIPS architecture for design, named Baikal series. About two months ago, Baikal Electronics began to receive self-developed Baikal-M SoC from TSMC.
Baikal-M has 8 Cortex-A57 cores, the highest frequency is 1.5GHz, but also equipped with Mali-T628 MP8 GPU, the frequency is 750MHz. In addition, it also supports dual-channel DDR4-2400 or DDR3-1600 memory, power consumption does not exceed 35W, and is manufactured using TSMC’s 28nm process. Obviously, this configuration is not enough to meet future performance requirements. According to Twitter user @torgeek, Baikal Electronics has illuminated the new Baikal-S code-named “BE-S1000”.
Baikal-S processor is also based on the Arm architecture, with 48 Cortex-A75 cores, the base frequency is 2.0 GHz, the acceleration frequency is 2.5 GHz, and the TDP is 120W. Baikal-S is more special, the package also contains a RISC-V architecture co-slave processor for safe startup and management. Baikal-S processor is a custom design, and it can also achieve four-way operation in the server motherboard. According to the official benchmark data of SPEC2006 CPU Integer, Coremark, Whetstone, 7Zip, and HPLinkpack, the overall performance is comparable to Intel’s Skylake architecture Xeon Gold 6148 (20 cores/2.4 GHz), or AMD Zen architecture 7351 (16 cores/2.9 GHz), compared with Huawei Kunpeng 920 (48 core/2.6 GHz), which is also Arm architecture, it is about 15% lower.
Baikal Electronics plans to produce 10,000 Baikal-S in 2022 and 30,000 in 2023.
