News Russian Nuclear Company Tests ‘Beaver’ PCs With Homegrown Baikal CPUs

[Admin]

A major Russian company is testdriving Arm-based PCs.

Russian Nuclear Company Tests ‘Beaver’ PCs With Homegrown Baikal CPUs : Read more

 

[Vanderlindemedia]

These are perfect all in one systems for light weight use.

The problem is US does'nt want Russia to have access to it's latest high-end/tech hardware. And there's a zillion ways to obtain such hardware. However with infested firmware's containing malware and all that, being able to be undetected i surely get why you want to design a home grown computer based system for goverment and such. The software is there, it's all open source and it can be setup to be a good alternative for X86/X64/Windows systems.

 

[bit_user]

These are perfect all in one systems for light weight use.

You looked at the specs, right? My phone from 2015 had ARM A57 cores, and I think they ran at a higher frequency than this SoC. They would almost be better off just buying some 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4's from the grey market ...except for the lack of ECC memory and RAS features that you'd want, if you're going to use them in a nuclear plant.

 

[Vanderlindemedia]

You looked at the specs, right? My phone from 2015 had ARM A57 cores, and I think they ran at a higher frequency than this SoC. They would almost be better off just buying some 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4's from the grey market ...except for the lack of ECC memory and RAS features that you'd want, if you're going to use them in a nuclear plant.

It's not about speed or specs; it's about having home grown CPU's or computers for that matter that are not US made. There where signs that motherboards, nics and HDD's would be having a hidden part inside the firmware, that could be activated remotely. Having such equipment in your goverment or even a nuclear plant is a high risk. Spying is real. And its almost impossible to check up on any server grade motherboard to figure out if it has hidden stuff build inside of it or not.

https://phys.org/news/2015-02-malware-infecting-hard-disk-firmware.html

 

[bit_user]

It's not about speed or specs;

Okay, but you said:

​

"These are perfect all in one systems for light weight use."​

​

That's what I was responding to. They're far from perfect. 10 years ago, they'd have been pretty good.

 

[usertests]

You looked at the specs, right? My phone from 2015 had ARM A57 cores, and I think they ran at a higher frequency than this SoC. They would almost be better off just buying some 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4's from the grey market ...except for the lack of ECC memory and RAS features that you'd want, if you're going to use them in a nuclear plant.

Baikal-M1 was theoretically interesting as a Raspberry Pi 4 desktop alternative (slower single, faster multi, much faster Mali GPU*) in a universe where they weren't ultra expensive and annihilated by sanctions. And a higher cost could have been justified by the feature set (RAM support, I/O) and Russian security concerns.

Sadly, it was not meant to be, and it joins a list of Russian "domestic" tech failures. I just hope that some of these rare SFF units will trickle down to tinkerers at a later date.

*Just based on GFlops reported for VideoCore VI and this MP6 version of the Mali-T628, it could be over 4x faster. Mali is also better supported than VideoCore. And of course, there's the PCIe 3.0 x8 capability for a discrete GPU.

 

[bit_user]

*Just based on GFlops reported for VideoCore VI and this MP6 version of the Mali-T628, it could be over 4x faster. Mali is also better supported than VideoCore. And of course, there's the PCIe 3.0 x8 capability for a discrete GPU.

Hmmm... from what I've read, the open source driver for Mali GPUs is in quite a dismal state. And if you have to use the proprietary driver, well... let's say that's not great for security.

The open source driver for Adreno, on the other hand, looks to be nearly up there with Intel and AMD. Given that, I'd suggest that a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c or 8cx would be much more interesting, as an ARM-based laptop & desktop platform. Lenovo is working on getting the Linux support for their Snapdragon-powered Thinkpad X13s into shape, and Microsoft has launched an update to their $600 Snapdragon-powered dev box that even includes 32 GB of RAM.

But, if you really want a Mali GPU, then you should look for a Rockchip RK3588(s) -based system. These guys even sell it in a mini-ITX form factor:

ITX-3588J 8K AI Mini-ITX Mainboard

Powered by Rockchip RK3588 new-gen 8-core 64-bit processor, the mainboard can be configured with up to 32GB RAM. Capable of 8K video encoding and decoding, it provides abundant interfaces supporting multiple hard disks, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi6, 5G/4G expansion and a variety of video input and...

en.t-firefly.com

...although that's a lot more expensive than something like the Orange Pi 5:

Orange Pi - Orangepi