Russian government to create its own Baikal CPU to replace Intel/AMD

The Russian government announced it's backing a project to create a new processor based on the ARM Cortex-A57 64-bit architecture. Named Baikal after the most voluminous freshwater lake in the world, this new processor series is designed by Russian supercomputer maker T-Platforms in cooperation with state defense firm Rostec and with co-financing rom state-run technology firm Rosnano.

Initially, there will be two Baikal processors for desktop PCs and microservers: the Baikal M and the Baikal M/S. The main goal is to create a chip that can replace AMD and Intel processors in government offices and state-run firms to prevent US spying via processor backdoors.

The Russian government and state-run firms purchase about 700,000 PCs and 300,000 servers per year totalling $1.3 billion in spending. If most of the processors currently come from the likes of AMD and Intel then this will represent a big loss of business for the US tech giants. The Baikal microprocessor design work isn't set to start until sometime next year, so at least this is a decent amount of notice to the US chip makers.

Source: Hexus