Stefan Mileschin

We can design them but no one will make them for us

Tsar Putin’s plan to churn out computer chips so that Russia can stick two fingers up at leading Western CPU makers such as AMD and Intel have stalled completely because he can’t find anyone to build the chips.

According to Tom’s Hardware**there are several Russian companies that design their own processors, but those chips are made by TSMC, and Taiwan no longer allows their export to Russia.

Even then, the numbers were low. Russian makers of PCs and servers this year supplied just 15,000 PCs and 8,000 servers based on Elbrus and Baikal processors designed in Russia and then fabbed in Taiwan.

It appears that the Russian government had believed that it would have shedloads of PCs and servers based on Russian CPUs this year if those batches of Russian processors, Elbrus, Baikals, which were ordered and produced, were shipped.

The Intellectual property and all documentation for the chips were Russian, but there were no production facilities in Russia that could produce those CPUs.

The designs were not exactly state-of-the-art. TSMC made MCST’s most sophisticated CPUs on its 16nm fabrication process but it was still better than what could be found in Mother Russia where the most advanced lab could produce chips on a 90nm node.

Taiwan authorities banned exports of processors that have the performance of over 5 GFLOPS, operate at 25 MHz or higher, feature an external interconnection with a data transfer rate of 2.5 MB/s or over, or have an ALU that is wider than 32 bits.

https://fudzilla.com/news/56025-russ...-chips-stalled