Russia created some astounding 48-main Arm SoCs ahead of the sanctions started off

In context: Russian chip maker Baikal Electronics was halfway to having an SoC series that spanned from 8 cores to 48 ahead of Russia invaded Ukraine and invited sanctions that crippled its nascent semiconductor market.

But in advance of the sanctions have been handed down, Baikal gained several prototypes of its latest (and probably last) SoC from TSMC. Somehow, some of them have ended up in the palms of a Russian fanatic who's shared them with Fritchens Fritz, a enormously gifted chip photographer.

Fritzchens Fritz wields his infrared microscope on both equally Twitter and Flickr.

This monstrous procedure on a chip is the BE-S1000. It was developed for server purposes and has 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores. It features a 2 GHz all-main clock and a 120W TDP. It was made on the TSMC 16FFC node and actions in at an massive 607 mm².

Annotations by Locuza and photograph by Fritzchens Fritz.

In a ring close to the centre of the SoC are 12 compute clusters that every have four cores and four 512 KB blocks of L3 cache. Each main incorporates its own 512 KB of L2 cache and two 64 KB blocks of L1 cache. In the middle of the SoC is a four-by-four grid of 2 MB blocks of L4 cache that sum up to 32 MB. Across the full processor there are 24 MB of L3 and L2 cache and 6 MB of L1 cache: 86 MB in whole, shared between 48 cores.

About the perimeter are the IO controllers. The remaining and ideal flanks residence 5 PCIe 4. x16 controllers, 3 of which can double as CCIX 1. modules and help 2-way and 4-way SMP (symmetric multiprocessing). At the major and base are 6 memory controllers that can each and every manage a 72-bit channel to 128 GB of DDR4-3200 with ECC, or 768 GB concerning them.

Baikal backs up that spectacular spec sheet with some benchmark figures. It compares the S1000 in a number of slides with the 20-main Intel Xeon Gold 6148, 16-core AMD Epyc 7351, and 48-main Huawei Kunpeng 920. It concludes that the SoC is about equivalent to the AMD and Intel CPUs but only 85% as rapidly as Huawei's fairly related Arm-dependent SoC.

In raw quantities, the S1000 scores an spectacular 14,246 details in the Geekbench 5 multi-main take a look at, placing it on par with the Ryzen 7 5900X. In the SPEC CPU 2017 integer and floating issue benchmarks it scores 76.6 points and 68.7 details, respectively, placing it in the territory of the 5800X.

It is really a shame that the S1000 will likely never access the market place. Baikal looks to have had it slated for arrival in Russian markets for either this year or next, but TSMC has nearly undoubtedly been forced to cancel or indefinitely delay Baikal's orders mainly because of the sanctions.

Baikal only took shipping of its initial batch of processors from TSMC this time last year. It was just commencing to glimpse like Russia's bid to have a self-adequate semiconductor business could occur to fruition in just the following 10 years or two. Now it seems like that long run will by no means appear to go, and all we are still left with are curious oddities like the BE-S1000.