
A Look inside Russian 28nm MIPS CPU – Baikal-T1 - ingve
https://zeptobars.com/en/read/baikal-t1-mips-Imagination-Technologies-P5600-Warrior
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tutanchamun
Are the black areas in this picture [0] residue or destruction from removing
the heatspreder? What about the large areas that are not as dark? Is that
residue from the solder/thermalpaste?

I'm especially curious because the die shot from AMD's Ryzen has smaller but
kind of similiar looking areas. [1] But there they look too uniform to be
damage.

[0] [https://s.zeptobars.com/baikal-Si-HD.jpg](https://s.zeptobars.com/baikal-
Si-HD.jpg)

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/le2atYb.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/le2atYb.jpg)

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trsohmers
It's a flip chip design, so the heatspreader and thermal paste does not touch
the part that you are seeing in these images. The areas that I think you are
referring to (the big "blob" areas) are computer place and routed standard
cells (primarily transistors) that the PNR tool brute forces efficient
placement under certain constraints. While it does not produce the most pretty
or clean design, it does a good enough job in optimizing for speed and area
for most designs.

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tutanchamun
Yes, that are the areas I was reffering to. Thank you for the explanation.

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rodionos
Any one of those pictures should look great on my screensaver. Getting a bit
tired of all those scenic sierra and half dome pictures.

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didymospl
Judging from the title, I was expecting something like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll)

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maxaf
Your stereotypes aren't funny. Please check them at the door.

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didymospl
Oh come on, this was supposed to be a harmless tongue-in-cheek comment. I come
from a country which is far behind Russia in terms of technology and I really
didn't think anyone could take it as some way of mocking. My bad

~~~
matthewaveryusa
I thought it was funny and particularly relevant because the article is
written in a macro->micro progression in the tear-down. Hackernews does tend
to want to stay dry. It reminds me of my second post where I got dinged trying
to be funny.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211855)

~~~
agumonkey
Also recursion theory. And Russian turtles. And recursion theory.

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jokr004
Man, those die images are phenomenal.

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bluedino
Are these only used in supercomputers, or is it common for PC's and
workstations in Russia?

~~~
kovrik
These are mostly for government structures, military etc. No one is using them
(or, say, Elbrus) at home for PC's/workstations. Maybe only some geeks and
just for fun. Usually you can't even buy them in normal computer stores (at
least I have never seen any).

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walterbell
How can this be purchased? Imagination claims that CPU and associated GPU both
support hardware virtualization.

~~~
konart
Right now you have to be a legal entity (hope this is a correct term) to buy
them, but I'm pretty sure that their board will be available for public soon:
[https://habrahabr.ru/post/320840/](https://habrahabr.ru/post/320840/) (review
in russian)

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olegkikin
"Russian", as in licensed from Imagination Technologies (UK) and manufactured
in Taiwan.

~~~
_yosefk
Hey, chipmakers deserve more credit than that! I'm a chip architect and we
license from IMG and we license IP from others as well, but then there's a
shitton of work and plenty of things which can go wrong, costing loads of
money and big delays. For those chip makers rolling their own IPs, this is
rarely the biggest risk, the biggest risk is integrating everything into a
working, marketable chip delivered more or less on time and within budget.

Incidentally, the reason why chip companies are worth so much more than IP
companies is that the cost and risk of making chips is much larger. IP and
chip companies are both fabless, if the costs and risks were about the same,
then I don't see why profits wouldn't be about the same.

Now it could be that in this instance, marketability, schedule and budget
weren't a particularly big deal, and maybe the performance is so bad that this
in itself made a lot of problems disappear. But I think it's likely that
someone still sweated quite some to make it work. (TFA claims they were the
first to implement this CPU in silicon, BTW - again, could be easy enough if
they didn't care about performance at all, or if Imagination did all the work
on the synthesis scripts and the backend or held their hand, but if they
wanted high performance and had to optimize synthesis and placement
themselves, that's serious work. TSMC won't do it for you, either - they want
a GDS-II file, and I don't think they outsourced the actual chip design.)

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nanxor
>I'm a chip architect

Many people with an ECE/CS background have probably had a FPGA + VHDL/Verilog
course.

What are some additional skills needed to enter the chip industry?

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_yosefk
Don't ask me, it was mostly luck in my case. In general I think in chips even
more than elsewhere you want to work at a small place to get big
responsibilities quickly, and from that angle, right now doesn't look like a
great time to enter the industry, since FinFET mask costs are 10x what they
used to be in bulk CMOS and so the expected payout needed to justify risking
the capital went up a lot, so less projects starting small. Maybe if node
shrinks stop and mask costs go back down and people will start making plenty
of specialized lower-volume chips since you won't be able to win just by
shrinking high-volume architectures, it will be a good time to enter the
industry again.

~~~
trsohmers
> "... since FinFET mask costs are 10x what they used to be in bulk CMOS"

Not true, it is closer to 2 to 3x, and it is (slowly) getting cheaper. While
it will take a long time (~3 years) for 14/16nm FinFET processes to reach
price parity with what 28nm is now, it is dropping in price faster than when
the 28nm generation came out due to the massive volumes of Apple, NVIDIA, etc.

It is looking like the 28nm generation will be a mainstay node, with continued
investments by the major pure play fabs to keep bringing costs lower.

~~~
phkahler
>> It is looking like the 28nm generation will be a mainstay node, with
continued investments by the major pure play fabs to keep bringing costs
lower.

Is that because it's essentially the last planar node? IIRC 20nm kinda sucked
for both planar and FinFET so 28 is the last planar and 14/16 is looking like
a long term node as well. Is that why you think 28 will be a mainstay?

I'm seeing 28,14 and 7 as pretty much stable and widespread over the next 10
years, with 14 and 7 being significant for cost/perf and cost/density reasons.

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patrickg_zill
Interesting chip - under 5W usage and yet powerful enough for lots of things.
I wonder what one of these with 8GB RAM and 1x10Gbe, 2x SATA connectors would
use for power.

EDIT: the Broadcom chipset used in the Rasp. Pi 3 is still at 40nm process,
according to what I can find. So not sure why people would question the 28nm
process' usefulness.

