The Russian-Ukraine war has affected the global economy, and Microsoft, Apple, and Google have imposed sanctions on Russia.
On March 3, Oracle in the field of international databases announced the suspension of all operations in the Russian Federation, which means that companies based on Oracle databases will be paralyzed.
Blockade Dilemma
A subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian government-owned nuclear energy company, is testing a personal computer made by Delta Computers that uses a processor designed by Russian company Baikal Microelectronics and a Linux distribution approved for use by Russian state agencies.
Although the road ahead is full of obstacles, Russia is trying to break the blockade and try to achieve domestic substitution.
The Beaver is a small form factor PC that runs Baikal Electronics’ Baikal-M1 (BE-M1000) chip and the Astra Linux special edition operating system. Beaver can support up to 64GB of DDR4 memory and up to 16TB of HDD and SSD storage.
The machine has multiple USB Type-A 2.0/3.0 ports, PS/2 connectors, an RS-232 header, two Ethernet ports, an HDMI output, and two 3.5mm audio connectors for headphones and microphones . The computer can be upgraded with a low-profile PCIe 3.0 x8 add-on board, such as a graphics card.
Rosatom said in a statement that the company has purchased the first batch of Beaver home PCs based on the Baikal processor and is preparing to introduce them into the infrastructure of the Rosenergoatom energy generation company.
If it weren’t for its use of Russia’s native Baikal-M1 SoC processor, there’s nothing special about the Beaver. The Baikal-M1 is a fairly well-known processor, it contains 8 Arm Cortex-A57 cores, has 8MB L3 cache, operates at 1.50 GHz, and is paired with 8 Arm Mali-T628 GPUs, with two display channels.
The SoC adopts 28nm process technology, which is equivalent to the manufacturing technology in 2014-2015, and is manufactured by TSMC. However, due to the restrictions of US sanctions, this processor has been unable to continue to be manufactured.
While Rosatom may have procured Beaver’s samples, Delta Computers could not get enough processors because the owner of Baikal Microelectronics goes bankrupt at the end of 2022.
It is worth noting that Delta Computers is not the only Russian company developing a Baikal-M1-based PC so far. Russian brand Bitblaze, which specializes in servers, storage systems, and workstations, also showed off the Baikal-M1-based Bitblaze Titan BM15 notebook last August.
But the status has always been pre-production, and on Bitblaze’s website, the computer is still listed as being in development.
Crisis
In terms of hardware, technology companies such as Intel, AMD, Lenovo, Dell, and Apple have been exposed by foreign media that they have interrupted their supply to Russia. TSMC also stated that it will abide by US export controls.
On February 27, “Russian Business Consulting” (RBC) quoted two sources in the IT market as reporting that US CPU companies Intel and AMD had suspended shipments to Russia.
Intel and AMD verbally told Russian customers that their products could not be shipped to Russia for the time being, and that Chinese partners had received notices from Intel about a ban on supplying processors to Russia, one of the sources said.
At the same time, the Russian Association of Electronics Developers and Manufacturers (ARPE) also confirmed the news of Intel and AMD’s “discontinuation of supply”.
In terms of software, Oracle and SAP suspended all operations in Russia.
English