Last year Russian government officials said they wanted to reduce reliance on Intel and AMD chips and move to processors designed and built in the country.
Now the folks at Imagination Technology have announced that they’re working with a group of engineers to create a dual-core MIPS-based processor for communications applications. It’s called the Baikal-T1, and it’ll be produced in Russia by the fabless semiconductor company Baikal Electronics.
Russian citizens aren’t going to want to go out and buy laptops, desktops or tablets featuring the new chip: It’s a low-power processor that won’t really be able to compete with the latest x86 or ARM processors. But it’s a start. We may see more powerful chips from Baikal in the future (including some that may be based on ARM architecture rather than MIPS, if last year’s reports are accurate).
The Baikal-T1 is a 28nm chip that uses less than 5 watts of power. It has two 32-bit MIPS P5600 CPU cores clocked at 1.2 GHz.
Imagination says the chip will be used for wireless routers, home gateways, industrial devices, and other connected devices when it launches.
This processor is intended for various automatization industry system, such as automatic machining tools, satelite computers, military command , data gathering and translation, aa defence , etc ….
” fabless semiconductor company Baikal Electronics” so I wonder who is actually making the chips and has the NSA “modified” the design before production?
All your bits belong to us Comrade.
Don’t bother waiting, though. This CPUs production and development sponsored by Russian Military – it’s obviously forbidden to use foreign tech in multitude of military applications, so they want better chips then old Everests. Since it will be pricey, it won’t go into any consumer tech (military won’t let them spread outside of their applications too, most likely, just to be on a safer side).
at least chips will guaranted without NSA rubbish) it is very important for Russia.
Just the thing to revive an old SGI O2.