Russia's Baikal Chips End Up Going For A MIPS CPU

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 27 May 2015 at 12:46 PM EDT. 29 Comments
HARDWARE
Last year was news about Russia wanting to design its own processors to be less reliant upon Intel and AMD. The initial "Baikal" processor was expected to be based on ARMv8 but it turns out now that it's a MIPS design.

Imagination Technologies announced today that the initial Baikal-T1 processor is using a MIPS P5600 CPU. The Baikal-T1 isn't a desktop/laptop competitor to Intel and AMD designs but rather is meant for networking-related applications. The Baikal-T1 will be for Russian routers, network gateways, etc. Presumably they're doing this to ensure their processor hasn't been compromised by the NSA or other western organizations.

The MIPS P5600 CPU is dual-core and clocked at 1.2GHz while is manufactured on a 28nm process and has less than a 5 Watt TDP.

Those wishing to learn more about the Baikal-T1 being powered by the MIPS P5600 can be found via this ImgTec blog post.
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