Bitblaze, a Russian brand specializing in servers, storage systems and workstations, demonstrated a prototype Bitblaze Titan BM15 laptop based on the Russian-designed Baikal-M1 processor. Designed primarily for government agencies and hobbyists, the notebook is said to enter mass production in November. The only question is whether the company can actually mass-produce the machine now that TSMC does not produce advanced chips for any Russian company.
“I have a legend on my hands: pre-production Bitblaze Titan (opens in new tab) A laptop based on the Baikal-M processor is ready,” said Yana Brush, commercial director at Prombit, the company behind Bitblaze. blog post (opens in new tab)“Very good quality thin aluminum case, light weight. I’ve tested several mainstream software applications such as office programs and YouTube.It works flawlessly and the battery lasts 5 hours.Various We are continuing to test it on our workloads and preparing for the official release.”
Bitblaze Titan BM15 is a 15.6-inch laptop powered by Baikal Electronics’ Baikal-M1 (BE-M1000) system-on-chip, with 16GB of DDR4 memory (supports up to 128GB) and 250GB to 512GB of solid-state memory. State drive in M.2 form factor. The machine comes with a Wi-Fi + Bluetooth adapter, GbE, one USB 3.0 Type-C connector, four USB Type-A ports, an HDMI display output, and a 3.5 -mm audio connector.
The Bitblaze BM15 laptop comes in an aluminum chassis, but the exact dimensions and weight are unknown. As of late March 2022, the projected weight was in the ballpark at 2.2 kilograms (4.85 pounds) ( 3D news (opens in new tab) report), but the bill of materials has not been finalized at that time, so final weights may vary.
The machine pictured on the company’s website (which resembles Apple’s MacBook Pro 13) is very different from the prototype version Yana Brush has in her hands in the photo. The prototype resembles his cheap 15.6-inch mobile PC, which he sells for $399-$499 on BestBuy. On the other hand, in some cases the prototype unit may not contain the final design due to software compatibility testing. Bearing in mind that the company doesn’t reveal which Linux distribution the machine runs, you’ll have to test a variety of software.
Despite the “Titan” name, the BM15 falls far short of delivering the performance you’d expect from a notebook with such a name.At the heart of the Titan is the Baikal M1 SoC, which runs at 1.50 GHz with eight older It uses Arm Cortex-A57 cores and is equipped with 8 MB of L3 cache accompanied by 8 clusters of Arm Mali-T628 GPUs with 2 display pipelines. The Cortex-A57 first appeared as a commercial product in 2015, while the Mali-T628 (Midgard 2nd Gen) has been around since 2014. Baikal-M1 is manufactured by TSMC using one of his 28nm class nodes. Still, TSMC no longer produces chips for Russian companies, so whether Baikal Electronics pre-purchased enough of his SoCs to support the commercial launch of Bitblaze Titan and other products. just wondering.
Another aspect of the Bitblaze Titan notebook is the price. In March of this year, the company expected the price of the aluminum version of this product to be between 100,000 and 120,000 rubles ($1,375 to $1,650 without VAT), but the BOM has not been finalized, so the final price has yet to be announced. may be different. That’s a fair amount for an office machine, but might not matter for a collection item that uses his SoC, which is extremely rare.
“There is an opportunity to buy expensive prototype samples,” Brush said. “I mean, wait [mass produced units], will be released by November. We are accepting pre-orders. “
