Russian manufacturer demonstrates ARM server processor Baikal-S with 48 cores

Baikal Electronics has successfully launched its Baikal S1000. It is an Arm server processor with 48 Cortex-A75 cores. The Russian manufacturer wants to produce 10,000 copies next year and a year later the company wants to make 30,000.

There is both a BE-S1000X and a BE-S1000, shown by slides that developer Dmitrii Kuznetsov posted on Twitter. Baikal benchmarks the X variant against the Intel Xeon Gold 6148 and Huawei’s Kunpeng 920. The latter is also an Arm server processor.

According to Kuznetsov, the processor clock speeds are better than expected. The X model goes up to 2.5GHz. In a preliminary datasheet, the Baikal-S processor was still described with a clock speed of 2GHz. The chip has a TDP of 120W and can be used in systems with one to four sockets.

The Baikal-S processors are intended for servers and are made on a 16nm process from TSMC. The chips have six memory channels for up to 768GB of DDR4-3200 and feature 80 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

Motherboards for the Baikal-S processors will appear from April 2022, writes Rossa Primavera news agency. Deliveries of complete systems based on the Arm processors are expected to start in June. The production of the chips should increase by the end of 2022; from October, the company plans to make about 3,000 per month. That should be good for 10,000 chips in 2022 and 30,000 chips in 2023.

Baikal also already makes an Arm processor for desktops. This concerns the BE-M1000, which has been delivered since October. That is a chip with eight Cortex-A57 cores and a Mali-T628 GPU. This chip is made using a 28nm process from TSMC.