Benchmarks Of Russia's "Baikal" MIPS-Based Processors, Running Debian Linux

A few years back was the news of Russia wanting to get into the CPU business and at the time were aiming for ARM-based processors but ended up settling for MIPS. It turns out those "Baikal" processors are still around and being worked on as indicated by some fresh benchmarks this week.

Back in 2015 is when Baikal Electronics/T-Platforms announced their Baikal-T1 28nm SoC with DDR3 support, clock speeds up to 1.2GHz, SATA connectivity, USB 2.0, and Gigabit Ethernet. The Baikal-T1 was initially advertised as for use in networking appliances and industrial platforms but has also wound up in some Russian desktop PCs.

Appearing this week on OpenBenchmarking.org we are seeing a number of results come in from the Baikal-T1 at long last.

The results appear to be from the Baikal-T1 BFK3 evaluation board with dual-core processor based on the MIPS P5600 and sports 2GB of RAM with a 64GB SSD and running Debian GNU/Linux 9.3.

The "Baikal-T1 BFK3" is interesting and have been unable to find many references to the BFK3 variant aside from this Russian user manual dated from January.

Those wanting to check out these Baikal-T1 BFK3 evaluation board benchmarks, here are the benchmark results of most interest and variety. The results are on their own but you can compare them to many of our numbers with overlap from many of the same tests... Or if you want to see how your own Linux system(s) compare to the performance of a domestic Russian chip, you can install the Phoronix Test Suite and simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1803134-FO-BFK3DN25437.

It looks like we may be seeing more Baikal Linux benchmarks on OpenBenchmarking.org soon.