Twitter user Fritzchens Fritz (opens in new tab) has obtained a sample of Baikal Electronics’ 48-core BE-S1000 server-grade system-on-chip (SoC) and has successfully revealed its internals with an infrared microscope. Also, some SoC benchmark results have come out.
Baikal Electronics has developed several system-on-chips for various devices to replace x86 processors in Russian-made PCs and various computing appliances. However, the pinnacle of the company’s design prowess should have been the BE-S1000 server-grade SoC with 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores, which was taped out using TSMC’s 16FFC manufacturing technology for the first A sample was able to be manufactured, but will never be released commercially due to sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
The Baikal BE-S1000 SoC comes in the FCLGA-3467 package and operates in uniprocessor, 2-way, and 4-way symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) configurations. The processor consumes approximately 120W of power, so no special cooling system is required. The SoC has a die size of around 607mm², which is similar to the die size of his Nvidia’s AD102 graphics processor.
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In addition to detailed die shots of the BE-S1000 processor, Fritzchens Fritz (opens in new tab), Locusa (opens in new tab) An annotated chip floor plan is also available.
of Baikal BE-S1000 (opens in new tab) organizes 48 Art Cortex-A75 cores (running at 2 GHz) across 12 clusters. Each cluster contains 4 Arm Cortex-A75 cores with 512KB of L2 cache and 2MB of integrated L3 cache per core. Additionally, his 32MB of L4 cache, organized in four blocks, comes with the quad-core cluster.
The BE-S1000 processor has six 72-bit memory interfaces supporting up to 768 GB of DDR4-3200 and a total of ECC memory (i.e. 128GB per channel), five PCIe 4.0 x16 (4×4) interfaces (three of which are CCIX 1.0 support). to organize 2-way and 4-way SMP configurations), one USB 2.0 controller, two 1GbE interfaces, and various general-purpose I/Os. In addition, the SoC has an interconnect with a coherent mesh network.
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Baikal pitted the BE-S1000 against AMD’s 16-core EPYC 7351 (2.90 GHz), Intel’s 20-core Xeon Gold 6148 (2.40 GHz) and Huawei’s 48-core Kunpeng 920 (2.60 GHz). Locusa (opens in new tab)In terms of performance, Baikal slides out the BE-S1000, which was supposed to be on the market in 2022-2023, but Intel’s Xeon Gold 6148 (since 2017), HPLinpack (a benchmark for supercomputers) of all sorts. benchmark shows that it outperforms by a significant margin. This is not particularly surprising given that the Cortex-A75 was never designed to run high performance computing workloads with his FP64 precision.
In general, the Baikal BE-S1000 looks like a brave attempt to develop a server-grade SoC that could replace AMD and Intel processors in some machines, but the chip came too late, It would have been slower than most modern CPUs at the time. x86 camp. Potentially, this could have been mitigated for the right price (at least in some cases). But because of Russia’s bloody war in Ukraine, the BE-S1000 remains an interesting artifact in the lab and never becomes a real product.
