Russian company unveils its first commercial Baikal-T1 soc

Russian company Baikal Electronics has revealed its first commercial soc. It is a mips-soc for embedded systems. The development has been stimulated by the Russian government and in time government systems will have to run on Baikal chips.

Baikal Electronics will have the Baikal -T1 manufactured at 28nm at TSMC, according to the announcement on LinkedIn. The chip has two 32-bit mips cores based on the P5600 series announced in 2013. There is 1MB L2 cache and the clock speed is 1.2GHz. The SOC supports DDR3-1600 memory and includes integrated interfaces for 10Gbit/s and 1Gbit/s Ethernet, PCI-E 3.0 x4, SATA 600 and USB 2.0. The consumption would be less than 5W and industrial and embedded systems with the chips could be passively cooled. In June Baikal will release the first samples of the T1.

According to Hrenov Gregory, chief technical officer at Baikal, the arrival of the processor is “without doubt a major milestone for the Russian electronics industry.” The Russian Ministry of Trade has actively supported the development of the chip. That incentive is part of the Russian government’s aim to be less dependent on American technology in particular.

Last year it was announced that the Russian government wants to get rid of AMD and Intel systems and start using Baikal chips. However, it was an arm chip. The status of this development is unknown. Incidentally, Baikal expects that there will also be demand for its chips outside Russia.