Russia To Replace AMD/Intel CPUs With 64-bit ARM Hardware

[STrRedWolf]

Okay, so instead of US designed hardware (AMD/Intel) that could have been infiltrated by the NSA, they're going with hardware designed in the UK (ARM) that could have been infiltrated by UK's MI5. Great thinking, Putin.

And then you got:
[ul][li]MIPS, which is US designed, but has just been bought by a UK firm, so it's a NSA/MI5 combo!
[li]SPARC, which is US designed by Sparc, now Oracle.
[li]PowerPC, which also is US designed by Apple, IBM, and Microsoft.[/ul]

Ugh. Putin better start designing his next-gen processors, because I doubt even the SH arch is active...

[stiiixy]

Are these CPU's meant for public consumption, or purely just government offices? I can understand them wanting to reduce their American spy-hole chances in their governement machines, but why would they care about the public and their porn habits? The only benefit there would be to keep costs down from an engineering side of things.

The Baikal chips will be installed on computers of government bodies and in state-run firms, which purchase some 700,000 personal computers annually worth $500 million and 300,000 servers worth $800 million. The total volume of the market amounts to about 5 million devices worth $3.5 billion.

[mmstick]

Are these CPU's meant for public consumption, or purely just government offices? I can understand them wanting to reduce their American spy-hole chances in their governement machines, but why would they care about the public and their porn habits? The only benefit there would be to keep costs down from an engineering side of things.

Could me many reasons.

#1 Mass consumption means mass profit which means better research into better processors for the future.
#2 Compromised civillian systems can still become part of botnets for other nations.

[stiiixy]

Could me many reasons.

#1 Mass consumption means mass profit which means better research into better processors for the future.
#2 Compromised civillian systems can still become part of botnets for other nations.

It'll certainly be interesting how it pans out. Russia's big enough it can do this sort of thing on its own and make it work. However as was mentioned, politically it's pretty corrupt and we'll see how much, if any, of these units are shipped (to whom, although that tends to be hushhush where govvies are concerned), and what sort of software support they offer in regards to linux. And if there's any contribution to OSS.

If there's none, who gives a shit, eh? =D

[blackiwid]

Okay, so instead of US designed hardware (AMD/Intel) that could have been infiltrated by the NSA, they're going with hardware designed in the UK (ARM) that could have been infiltrated by UK's MI5. Great thinking, Putin.

The Design is not the main problem. if intel would lisense other companies with their design maybe they would use these chips.

As far as I understand the the arm deal, u get them some money for using their design, then they give u all the specs so you can build it. And with that u can build it, and u can build your own bios for it. And u dont need to package it with a nsa-backdoor like vpro.

So its 100% save you cant hide a nsa-backdoor in a cpu-spec. I dont see that can be done.

[leonmaxx]

Guys, when You hear something about Russia, first You should check if it is'nt a fake.

The company that have to develop a Russian CPU is Baikal Electronics. Look at their site: http://www.baikalelectronics.ru
It is a 1 page site... This project is about money stealing, not about CPU development. Just remember "ROSNano" with their "Nano-Tank".

Sorry for my bad English.

[sarmad]

Celebrate? Sure, Russians and their allies can celebrate, but for the rest of the world there isn't much difference between the NSA and the KGB (or whatever the Russian intelligence agency is). Not saying Russian intelligence will add backdoors to this new processor, but the chances of them doing so is just as high/low as the chances of the NSA adding backdoors to Intel/AMD.

[GreatEmerald]

better watch it. If there are any russkies living in yer country they'll use it as an excuse to "intervene"...

Been there, done that. We've been occupied by them three times so far, and they find a pretext to do that no matter what. If one pretext doesn't work, they find another, or just continue with the first one regardless. There was a nice example of how during one of the later ones they accused the country of kidnapping Russian officers. The authorities asked everyone to stay calm and start a search for them. They were found, simply drinking in some country club, completely unharmed. The Red Army didn't give a damn and invaded anyway.

[curaga]

How long before we have "majority vote" redundant systems, ones that do the same computation on at least three different vendors' cpus? One murican, one russian, one chinese, see if they agree.

[profoundWHALE]

As far as business standpoint goes, this makes sense. You want Russian people buying Russian products if you are a business or government in Russia. The part that confuses me is I'm sure that there's an Intel location is Moscow, so that's a little weird. Basically if money is flowing within Russia, the Russian government gets more money. If money is flowing to in-country technology companies, technology and demand for educated workers is increased, increasing their influence in the educated world.

Also Russia could just enforce real-world spying components this way to monitor and control everything in their country.