News Taiwan Restricts Russia, Belarus to CPUs Under 25 MHz Frequency

[kerberos_20]

Well, couldn't Russia order Taiwanese chips through China or other countries?

china has already ban for us based hardware i doubt they or other countries would want to poke in hornet nest

 

[Chung Leong]

Well, couldn't Russia order Taiwanese chips through China or other countries?

The fact that Azerbaijan's import suddenly jumped 150% certainly looks suspicious. Not much the West can do, since that country is a major oil and gas producer.

 

[SunMaster]

Well, couldn't Russia order Taiwanese chips through China or other countries?

Because if resell to Russia you won't get to buy any more. These mechanisms are no jokes.

 

[artk2219]

Russian kids be like: Hey Dad, you got any games on your PC? Parents: Sure son! We have a massive variety of games here!!! What would you like play? We've got minesweeper, solitaire, Quake, Duke Nukem, and we even have a first person shooter called Doom! Let's Play!!

You say that jokingly but Quake requires like a 200 mhz x86 cpu for smooth play and Doom needed something like a pentium 75 for smooth play, 25mhz wouldnt really cut it unless it had some crazy IPC. But even thats limited by the fact that it cant have an external bus over 2.5 mbps, that cant even keep up with transfers on an ATA 33 bus. That being said, there are still literally thousands of games available from 95 and before that you could get to run on a machine like that, anything up to the Genesis (Mega Drive) or SNES would be doable. I guess your practical limit would be around roughly what the Nintendo SuperFX chip or Sega SVP could do, and the SuperFX chip had some decent and impressive games available for it.

https://handwiki.org/wiki/Engineering:Sega_Virtua_Processor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX

 

[hotaru.hino]

You say that jokingly but Quake requires like a 200 mhz x86 cpu for smooth play and Doom needed something like a pentium 75 for smooth play, 25mhz wouldnt really cut it unless it had some crazy IPC. But even thats limited by the fact that it cant have an external bus over 2.5 mbps, that cant even keep up with transfers on an ATA 33 bus. That being said, there are still literally thousands of games available from 95 and before that you could get to run on a machine like that, anything up to the Genesis (Mega Drive) or SNES would be doable. I guess your practical limit would be around roughly what the Nintendo SuperFX chip or Sega SVP could do, and the SuperFX chip had some decent and impressive games available for it.

Considering a lot of 90s PC games ran more or less fine on either the PlayStation or Sega Saturn, which had a 33MHz and 28MHz CPU(s) respectively, with some optimization you could likely get them to run on a modern CPU running at 25 MHz.

 

[shady28]

I have no idea what the impact of this would be, but I was curious about what types of processors they actually use in military applications. I wouldn't expect them to use off the shelf stuff since, like US Mil Spec, they have to be hardened against EMP / radiation and so on.

So I looked a bit, found this :

30N6E2 Tomb Stone Engagement Radar

1. Replacement of the legacy data processor with a new Russian built ruggedised Elbrus-90 Mikro SPARC architecture quad CPU system, with a 500 MHz clock and 500 MB of RAM. All code is implemented in C language. The additional processing capability is used to support the revised missile control laws;

• Elbrus-90micro (1998–2010) is a computer line based on SPARC instruction set architecture (ISA) microprocessors: MCST R80, R150, R500, R500S and MCST-4R working at 80, 150, 500, and 1000 MHz. The Elbrus-90 is used to control the S-400 missile system.[2]

The S-400 SAM is considered to be one of the best SAM systems in the world, if not the best.

Also, if you look up the list of semi fabs on Wikipedia, Russia has at least one and possibly two 65nm capable fabs run by Mikron. Most of the Elbrus are on 90nm though, 65nm node is supposedly functional in 2020+. Most likely the Elbrus-90 above is a quad core 90nm chip.

90nm would have been state of the art for Athlon X2, Turion 64 X2, G5 power PC Macs, and dual-core Opterons. This would be western CPUs around 2003-2005.

65nm would be Pentium D, early Core 2 models, AMD Athlon and Phenom models along with early smartphone SoCs like TI OMAP 3. This would be state of the art for CPUs around 2006-2008.

I use 'for cpus' deliberately, the smaller nodes always come out earlier for memory than for a full SoC or CPU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikron_Group


Last but not least :

"While there are plans to educate local talent and develop chips domestically, one of the things that the country plans to do by the end of the year is to establish a reverse engineering program of 'foreign solutions' to transfer their manufacturing to Russia. All digital items should be produced domestically by 2024. Things that the country cannot make domestically are expected to be sourced from China. "

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/russia-semiconductor-plan-28nm

 

[Umfriend]

I think the Russians will become masters of overclocking, maybe even get a 100% OC!

 

[edzieba]

It is a step in the right direction, but I have yet to understand the actual effect of these measures.

What is this? A new game? Let's play Diplomacy 2022:

Oh, look, Taiwan doesn't sell chips to Russia.

Well, couldn't Russia order Taiwanese chips through China or other countries?

Any countrys reselling sanctioned items to Russia would also be liable under sanctions. As would companies selling to those intermediaries without due diligence.

China may also be less enthusiastic to sell to Russia then people think: There's little production output that Russia has that China needs beyond maybe petrochemicals (and not only are there no existing undercapacity pipelines for that route, China can clearly observe Russia's current actions in using that energy dependence to their own ends in Europe, so are likely wary of purchases in sufficient quantities to allow Russia any leverage via supply control), China has no use for Roubles, and Russia has rapidly diminishing foreign currency available thanks to sanctions. The sanctions that restrict Russia from modern ICs means China also has the option to fob off old production onto Russia at inflated prices (sellers market) if they particularly wanted to get involved, but all signs so far indicate China has little desire to get dragged down with Russia. Like India they've not been willing to join in the current multinational sanctions, but they've also not been providing direct support either.

 

[Old Molases]

But why?? I dont get it..

 

[USAFRet]

But why?? I dont get it..

Why what?