According to recent reports, Russia’s Baikal Electronics received its first batch of Arm SoCs from TSMC this week and this is a major step towards the Russian government’s goal of a self-sufficient electronics industry.
As we know, Russia has entered into a new revolution of using its own home manufactured electronics and make itself less dependent on the processing power of units, developed in the western countries.
Baikal’s new processor, which is the company’s second-ever produced unit, is called the BE-M1000. The SoC is an octa-core Arm design with a focus on connectivity and the first production of TSMC yielded about 5,000 chips, which were shipped to Baikal inside one large and very expensive crate.
Though many might argue that 5,000 processors aren’t much to attract interest from the market, and Baikal still has to prove itself as a performance-oriented chip producer. However, Baikal claims to have already partnered with several system integrators to produce computers that will launch in a matter of months.
Among the company’s recent partners, the most significant is the iRU, Russia’s largest domestic system integrator. The company recently announced its plans to start selling office computers based on the BE-M1000 in Q1 2022.
Baikal announced that the company is soon expecting to receive monthly shipments of 10,000 to 15,000 processors by the time iRU wants to sell its systems.
“We managed to adapt to the market conditions: we started working on organizing mass production almost two years ago and were able to book production lines in advance at fixed terms early on. Thus, we entered the crisis prepared. Our good relationships with major international suppliers along the whole production line helped a lot, too.”
