TECH

Russia's 48-core Baikal-S processor has been revealed on a server motherboard

Russia is now dealing with sanctions due to its attack on Ukraine, yet a motherboard with the Baikal BE-S1000 processor, believed to be manufactured by TSMC, has surfaced and is subject to the ban. The board was supposed to go to the servers.

The new Russian Baikal processors were to be built on the ARM architecture. Already at the end of 2021, there was talk of a server version of Baikal-S, however, the Russian attack on Ukraine resulted in the sanctions of many countries, including Great Britain, which in this case affected chips with ARM architecture, which should have been produced for Russia by TSMC using 16nm technologies. Russia shouldn't get any more Baikals, so we only have the mysterious ET113-MB server motherboard from Eliptech (formerly part of the cloud provider that belongs to Sberbank).

The Baikal BE-S1000 processor is a 48-core model that uses ARM Cortex-A75 cores. Their base clock rate is 2.0 GHz, and a maximum of 2.5 GHz can be reached in boost. The maximum consumption then peaks at 120 W. Another interesting feature is the coprocessor built on the RISC-V architecture. We also have a 6-channel DDR4-3200 memory controller with a maximum capacity of 768 GB (128 GB per channel). The location of the ports on the motherboard is interesting. There are perhaps a little surprising audio jacks on the server board. There are 4 U.2 ports, several PCIe Gen4 slots, a single USB 2.0 slot, two 1GbE connections and several ports for 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drives.

Author: Milan Šurkala