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."
Business sells to bad government, there is a cost! (Score:5, Insightful)
Been saying this for years now since the earliest reports of NSA spying and the cooperation of technology companies came out. Most people kept saying it was nonsense that global trust in US technology can never be lost if only because ours is "the best" and is too expensive to replace. Seems to me that's not a deciding factor these days. The bad behaving US government is causing real harm to business now. As soon as business begins to realize how toxic that relationship is, they will stop doing it. But then again, we still have lots of companies trying to send (outsource) tech to China... China who has a long history of taking the tech and spinning it off on their own. Hoy myopic can they be?
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I wonder what their reasoning is...? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It will be interesting to see how good these ch (Score:4, Insightful)
That might not be a bad target. The Russian space program has a history of reliable but fairly conservative designs, e.g. the Soyuz has a solid multi-decade track record. Versus the American space program, which goes for more cutting-edge stuff like the Space Shuttle, but has more reliability problems.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
Better than revolving their economy around selling things they can find in other people's ground, eh, America?
Seriously, though, Russia's biggest mistake in the past 100 years was Khrushchev's decision to pursue a mission of copying the West rather than developing independently of the West. Lenin was a genius and Stalin was pure evil, but they (especially Stalin) were technocratically brilliant.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It will be interesting to see how good these ch (Score:5, Insightful)
The Soyuz had two loss of crew accidents in 120 flights. And ten more mission failures.
Shuttle had two loss of crew accidents in 135 flights. And no extra mission failures.
I fail to see the reliability advantage of the Soyuz.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is going to slap an embargo on them? Not the UN, Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council. I can't imagine China would vote for that either.
What percentage of processors are made in (mainland) China?
The OpenSSL Disasters were a result of attitude. (Score:1, Insightful)
The recent OpenSSL disasters were the result of the attitude of the open source security community.
Unless you had already been blessed by their High Priests, they would yell " NEVER ROLL YOUR OWN CRYPTO! " at you over and over and over if you tried to practice the craft. They would drown you in ridicule. They would do this even if you merely tried to critique their code!
Now, most reasonable computer programmers don't want to be subjected to this sort of antagonism, so they just wouldn't get involved with reading or writing crypto code because it inevitably meant being on the receiving end of such antagonism.
Then the Disasters came. OpenSSL, which a lot of people quietly suspected was total shit, was indisputably proven to be total shit. The High Priests were shown to be windbags, and void of substance. Their precious code was flawed in the most serious of ways. But more importantly, they were proven to have been wrong several times over.
The whole situation reminds me of the lyrics of a famous song from a few years back, chronicling the fall of the self-appointed "Elite":
Same shit as the Chinese Longsoon processor (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't something serious, just nationalism and/or cronyism. A real domestic processor project? It wouldn't be "dozens of millions of dollars" it would be tens of billions. Intel spent $10 billion on R&D... in 2013 alone. TSMC, who's just a fab not a designer, spent $1.4 billion in 2013.
Semiconductor manufacture is EXPENSIVE. A single modern fab easily tops a billion dollars to build, more like $3 billion. That's just to build it, running it and upgrading it can easily cost that much again over a few years. That is projected to grow to about $15 billion for a high end fab in 2020. All that, and you only have the ability to make chips, you don't actually have any chips to make.
Designing chips is again expensive. You need a bunch of smart, skilled, and experienced engineers and they need to put in a ton of work. It takes years. Companies that do fast design revisions have multiple teams that trade off working on chips, one team will be working on the next gen chip, another team on the gen after that, so that there is enough time to get the designs done.
So if Russia really wanted their own chips, like their own design, their own production, and all that, and wanted said chips to be on the same level as modern chips from Intel, IBM, etc, well they'd have to spend a ton of money, and a good amount of time.
This is, as you say, posturing. License an existing core design (made by Western nations), build an older technology fab, and produce some low end chips that aren't really that useful.
Re:It will be interesting to see how good these ch (Score:1, Insightful)
The Soyuz is still doing missions, 31 years after its last accident. The Shuttle shuttle was retired in 2011, 8 years after its last accident.
I know which one I would feel safer in today.
American arrogance (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention the difficulties of actually producing sufficient quantities of working state of the art processors to replace all those chips from Russian chip foundries.
We Americans do not have a monopoly on smart people or technical know-how. As a matter of fact, for the last 15+ years we have been offshoring much of our high tech manufacturing - it's not just the low tech shit. Intel has been offshoring much of their stuff and I like the idea of karma coming to bite them in the ass.
Russia has LOTS of hard currency and they can buy the best of the best from any company on the planet. So, if they do have a problem, they can just buy someone from Intel, AMD or someone else - or just hire someone that one of those companies canned - I mean "downsized" - what a way to get back at the short sighted-treat people like commodity-corporate assholes.
In other words, I have no doubt that the Russians will be successful - and more power to them. I am looking forward to some advances in microchip technology.
Re:Lets Get Real (Score:3, Insightful)
Small budget?
Well... it all depends on their priorities... Either it's "Make the best X we can with Y amount of money" or "Make the cheapest X we can for Y amount of money that we then can sell for Z amount of money so we can finance project Q"
The first option there is probably the best.. And the second part here is that they can probably ignore all the existing patents that covers all this and there by reducing per-unit cost with quite a bit.
Okayyyy! (Score:4, Insightful)
But then they won't be able to pirate Windows for these systems.
Oops! Was I not supposed to point out the elephant in the room?
Re:Same shit as the Chinese Longsoon processor (Score:5, Insightful)
...
So if Russia really wanted their own chips, like their own design, their own production, and all that, and wanted said chips to be on the same level as modern chips from Intel, IBM, etc, well they'd have to spend a ton of money, and a good amount of time.
...
All is as you say. But your conditional statement reveals why your argument is irrelevant.
Why do the Russian chips need "to be on the same level as modern chips from Intel, IBM, etc,"? They aren't trying to compete against those companies. They aren't selling them on the open market. They are simply using them of desktop computers and servers in the government, by government purchasing decision.
Commercial processors reached the level that they can fulfill all the real functional needs of the vast majority of desktop applications years ago. A decade old chip running decade old office software can do everything nearly everyone working in an office needs to do as well as the latest and "greatest". Microsoft, Intel, and the PC makers now work in quasi-collusion to force "upgrades" on businesses that do not need them or want them to keep the revenue flowing, but with diminishing success at doing so. Witness the fact that 28% of PCs still run Windows XP [dailytech.com] despite facing the artificial pressure of support termination by Microsoft, and not being able to buy any XP computers for years.
The advantages of using the newest chips have little or nothing to do with supporting the core office functions for which they are purchased - it is to run "eye candy", power saving (not an issue Russia cares about), or applications that actually harm typical office productivity.
The issue is a bit more complicated for servers - but most server applications only require a tiny fraction of modern chip capabilities, which is why high degrees of virtualization are now common. The Russians will have to use more server chips, but each app will still run fine.
Re:I wonder what their reasoning is...? (Score:4, Insightful)
You should call that humorous "economics"...
That's okay, because economists disagree on cause and effect at the highest levels, as well as the lowest ones. Given that, a high school economics student (honors or not, let's just take "passing" as a given for the scope of this conversation) probably has at least as good a chance to get economics right as anyone else, and probably a lot better than most.