Russian government to use its own ARM processors for PCs and servers

The Russian government is moving away from Intel and AMD processors in favor of a Russian-made processor based on the ARM architecture. Why Russia is making the switch is unknown. The first processor will appear in 2015.

The processor in question is called Baikal and is an octacore based on Cortex A57 microarchitecture with a clock speed of around 2GHz, writes Itar-Tass, a Russian news agency. The processor will be made at 28nm. In 2016, a variant with sixteen processor cores should appear.

Cortex A57 is the latest ARM core based on the ARMv8 architecture with 64bit support. In the near future, smartphones and tablets will also appear with Cortex A57 processor cores, whether or not in combination with the more economical and less powerful Cortex A53. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810, among others, has Cortex A57 cores in the soc.

Russia wants to use the Baikal processors for state desktops and servers. They still have processors from Intel and AMD on board. Why Russia wants to make the switch is unknown. Presumably, the Russian government wants to make sure that the security is in order by making the hardware itself.