Russia made some amazing 48-core Arm SoCs before the sanctions started

In context: Russian chip maker Baikal Electronics was midway to having an SoC sequence that spanned from eight cores to 48 earlier than Russia invaded Ukraine and invited sanctions that crippled its nascent semiconductor business.

However earlier than the sanctions have been handed down, Baikal obtained a number of prototypes of its newest (and maybe final) SoC from TSMC. In some way, a few of them have ended up within the arms of a Russian enthusiast who’s shared them with Fritchens Fritz, a tremendously gifted chip photographer.

Fritzchens Fritz wields his infrared microscope on each Twitter and Flickr.

This monstrous system on a chip is the BE-S1000. It was designed for server functions and has 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores. It includes a 2 GHz all-core clock and a 120W TDP. It was manufactured on the TSMC 16FFC node and measures in at an infinite 607 mm².

Annotations by Locuza and {photograph} by Fritzchens Fritz.

In a hoop across the middle of the SoC are 12 compute clusters that every comprise 4 cores and 4 512 KB blocks of L3 cache. Every core comprises its personal 512 KB of L2 cache and two 64 KB blocks of L1 cache. In the midst of the SoC is a four-by-four grid of two MB blocks of L4 cache that sum as much as 32 MB. Throughout the entire processor there are 24 MB of L3 and L2 cache and 6 MB of L1 cache: 86 MB in whole, shared between 48 cores.

Across the perimeter are the IO controllers. The left and proper flanks home 5 PCIe 4.0 x16 controllers, three of which may double as CCIX 1.0 modules and allow 2-way and 4-way SMP (symmetric multiprocessing). On the prime and backside are six reminiscence controllers that may every deal with a 72-bit channel to 128 GB of DDR4-3200 with ECC, or 768 GB between them.

Baikal backs up that spectacular spec sheet with some benchmark figures. It compares the S1000 in a few slides with the 20-core Intel Xeon Gold 6148, 16-core AMD Epyc 7351, and 48-core Huawei Kunpeng 920. It concludes that the SoC is roughly equal to the AMD and Intel CPUs however solely 85% as quick as Huawei’s fairly related Arm-based SoC.

In uncooked numbers, the S1000 scores a powerful 14,246 factors within the Geekbench 5 multi-core take a look at, placing it on par with the Ryzen 7 5900X. Within the SPEC CPU 2017 integer and floating level benchmarks it scores 76.6 factors and 68.7 factors, respectively, inserting it within the territory of the 5800X.

It is a disgrace that the S1000 will probably by no means attain the market. Baikal appears to have had it slated for arrival in Russian markets for both this yr or subsequent, however TSMC has virtually actually been pressured to cancel or indefinitely delay Baikal’s orders due to the sanctions.

Baikal solely took supply of its first batch of processors from TSMC this time final yr. It was simply starting to appear like Russia’s bid to have a self-sufficient semiconductor business might come to fruition throughout the subsequent decade or two. Now it seems to be like that future won’t ever come to cross, and all we’re left with are curious oddities just like the BE-S1000.