Nice. Stop monopolies or even oligopolies, especially from Five Eyes states. The US of A has way too much grip on the global computing market. Which, ironically, also hurts the USA in some ways.
ARM is still British though, no doubt still with backdoors. RISC-V may be our only hope, but even then it seems that companies are just using the open source ISA to make their own proprietary chips, not to make actual open source chips.
ARM is still British though, no doubt still with backdoors.
The ARM architecture has many implementations and can be scanned for backdoors when creating your own silicon. You just implied the Russians are too stupid to figure that out themselves.
RISC-V may be our only hope
I also hope for more RISC-V devices, but until they arrive on the market, ARM architecture is a good counterpoint to the x86 monopolies.
Do they get the complete core designs including what transistor does what? I was under the impression that the ARM company just sold generic cores but not information on their internal workings.
Do they get the complete core designs including what transistor does what?
Depends on how large the customer is and/or how much they pay. They can also do 3D X-ray scanning to compare the layout provided with what is actually delivered. X-ray-ing stuff and closely monitoring manufacturing including cryptographically signed layouts for wafer production is pretty common in the militaries and other highly sensitive areas.
See also: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-hunt-for-the-kill-switch / https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21698 / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_backdoor
Great to see some diversity coming through, the more the merrier really. This can only improve things for end users.
Came from a fabless Russian company. No mention where it was fab’d. Are we to assume TSCM ?(highly likely)
Not really powerfull, the Raspberry Pi 4 would be more powerfull.
I feel they have to invest into an open source ISA if they want to avoid any bans from USA.
To play the devils advocate, if the US does ban this, then they might threaten to ban US based operating systems unless they become open source (though this would never happen).
I don’t think it would affect america’s technological presence in Russia, like in China, people resort to piracy in order to use Windows.
Using ARM is swiming with the Sharks, at least they are actually investing in RISC-V
Baikal isn’t that powerful yet even for simple applications (search Russian videos about it on yt from unofficial channels). Also, almost nothing about it is Russian. The architecture is British, the manufacturer is Chinese. Though there’s a way less popular, but more Russian processor, Elbrus. They have their own architecture, though I’m not sure about the manufacturing.
