Russia Wants To Replace US Computer Chips With Local Processors 340
An anonymous reader writes with this news from Tass: Russia's Industry and Trade Ministry plans to replace U.S. microchips (Intel and AMD), used in government's computers, with domestically-produced micro Baikal processors in a project worth dozens of millions of dollars, business daily Kommersant reported Thursday. The article is fairly thin, but does add a bit more detail: "The Baikal micro processor will be designed by a unit of T-Platforms, a producer of supercomputers, next year, with support from state defense conglomerate Rostec and co-financing by state-run technological giant Rosnano.
The first products will be Baikal M and M/S chips, designed on the basis of 64-bit nucleus Cortex A-57 made by UK company ARM, with frequency of 2 gigahertz for personal computers and micro servers."
Re:I wonder what their reasoning is...? (Score:4, Informative)
Not paying attention? Russia is also breaking free of the petro-dollar monopoly. You may not think much of it, but the fact has been that all oil and gas has been traded in US dollars around the globe. That has been one of the reasons US dollars have maintained any value at all. With so much of the US production and even many services going overseas, we simply aren't producing anything here. At least not the way we once did and still can.
There are nations interested in de-Americanizing the world. I can't say I blame them right now. But as things fail to turn around or get corrected, we in the US are going feel the hurt in ways which are painful to imagine.
I know this is a favorite conspiracy among internet commenters for whatever reason, but the petrodollar conspiracy is a myth. The US dollar has value because it is legal tender in the worlds largest economy. The United States is also the worlds largest manufacturer, surpassing the next five manufacturers combined in total output. It also requires these goods to be sold in dollars. Domestically, the United States also has the largest capital holdings in the world, estimated to be valued in hundreds of trillions of dollars. Since the dollar is legal tender, these capital assets are also valued and traded in dollars. It is also the world's historically most stable currency, making it very attractive for sovereign reserve funds.
Source: I'm taking honors economics in high school right now.
Re:The OpenSSL Disasters were a result of attitude (Score:5, Informative)
The person who wrote the bug has described at length where the bug came from. The source code, and email history at the time obviously supports the very non paranoid origin that it came from a performance tweak to avoid allocating and deallocating memory. There was no NSA involvement.
Re:No, that means it is still being used (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to discuss irrelevancies, then why not bring up how much more the shuttle could do on a mission than Soyuz?
Well, right now the shuttles can do precisely zero, there are no missions at the various museums they're on display.
They have very close records.
Right. Now we're in fairyland. So far the Soyuz program had 2 crashes, one in its first manned mission (Soyuz 1) in '67 and the other Soyuz 11 in '71. That's about 43 years of no reliability problems, and we're a few generations later - so the reliability of Soyuz 11 is irrelevant for modern missions. Now compare that with the shuttle, which only started test flights in '81 and operational ones in '82. Yeah, it was _designed_ to do more, but that brought about those reliability problems. Of course the shuttle was quite more sophisticated and having it work as well as it did was no mean feat, just ask the Russians how Buran went for them. But in no way the overall reliability is in the same class as the Soyuz. Do few things but do them well works in engineering, be it aeronautics or Unix design.
But let's just consider the ratio of failed to successful missions, that seems more reasonable. By that metric, they are pretty close.
Right. Shall I take your word for it? hmm, let's check it out. Throw in some total mission time since we're at it.
So, a couple of accidents in the first 4 years (and 10 manned missions) is totally the same as the shuttle who, after the 2003 accident, still had foam-related scares in 2007, 4 years later. In short, you have no idea what you're talking about. Feel free to do armchair comparisons to your heart's content though, and do ignore the fact that nobody is building shuttle-type vehicles anymore for ... some strange and incomprehensible reasons.
Re:No, that means it is still being used (Score:4, Informative)
The sister ship of the Titanic, the RMS Olympic, steamed for 24 years before being replaced by the RMS Queen Mary and scrapped and was the largest ocean liner in the world from 1911-1913 (excepting the short reign of the Titanic). The other sister, the HMHS Britannic had the misfortune of meeting a mine. She was larger then the Titanic and benefited from the lessons learned from the sinking of the Titanic (the Olympic also benefited with retrofits) and even though she sank within an hour there was only 30 casualties which I believe includes the occupants of 2 life boats that got munched by the propellers. Would have been much better if all the portholes were closed and a water-tight door hadn't failed, may have been worse if the water had been freezing instead of room temperature.
The Titanic was never claimed to be unsinkable, just very safe, the press started the unsinkable BS.
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