We visited the Mikron factory in Zelenograd, not to be confused with the American memory manufacturer Micron. For us it was a very interesting and unusual experience — to see the production of microprocessors, domestic at that, with our own eyes. No less interesting were the interviews that we managed to get from Mikron specialists — we talked about Global Foundries and Intel, discussed the problems they face, the new process nodes, including 7nm, and much more.
There are some chip factories with old node sizes. I think they're used for military or something like this. There are plans to build more modern chip factories, but I doubt that they'll materialize.
Russia has good experience in designing CPUs, but they relied on Taiwan to produce those.
Probably the most likely scenario for future is that they'll continue designing CPUs and will print them on Chinese fabs. China has huge investments.
I've been actually wondering recently: how much of a "chip design and manufacturing edge" does a country need for military equipment? I would guess things like targeting systems and radars don't need the latest CPU or GPU technology, but how far can one go back, where's the "edge of diminishing returns" for military chip designs? Late 80's? Late 90's?
People have been giving Russians a hard time for using "washing machine parts" which are basically just off the shelf commodity chips. But they are sufficient for running the calculations needed.
Support for 16 TB of RAM is not impressive at all, actually. It just means that that the memory address bus is 46 bits wide. For comparison, AWS has offered 24 TB servers since 2019 based on Intel Xeon for SAP HANA in-memory databases: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-high-memory-update-new-...
That Russian CPU is also PCIe 3.0 in an era where PCIe 5.0 is becoming the standard. Similarly, DDR4 in the DDR5 era.
Can they manufacture these in volume? With good yields? Can they keep it up even if nobody will sell them chip fab machines and parts?
I’d call it a lucky accident, given the context - Russia would be harder to defeat otherwise. As for reasons - I’m guessing the usual, nobody wants to work on this, because pay is crap and, well, and I’m guessing many folks don’t want to work for nazis. That’s also why Russia can’t manufacture tanks anymore.
there's this weird Russian VLIW core called Elbrus. I think it exists for national security purposes, to have some completely sovereign design the Kremlin can trust.
Given current sanctions which blocked even supposedly Russian made CPUs - which actually were made in Taiwan - the has country declared the goal of "technological sovereignty(independence)", basically back to USSR, and in several years we can expect more of similarly older tech chips from Russia which will be of archaeological interest like those USSR chips in that and other similar posts/articles.
They've made a law recently fully legalizing gray import, i.e. basically denying IP protection to the companies from the "unfriendly countries" - very similar to the USSR times when it was de-facto so.
I'm reminded of the old saying (paraphrased) "there is an in group which laws protect but do not constrain, and an out group which laws constrain but do not protect".
Are there any Russian investments in this space?