Fritzchens Fritz obtained a sample of the Baikal Electronics 48-core BE-S1000 server-grade system-on-chip (SoC) using an infrared microscope to see what was inside. Additionally, the SoC's benchmark results have been released.
Baikal Electronics has developed a series of system-on-chip chips to replace Russian-made x86 CPUs with PCs and other computing devices. The BE-S1000 server-grade SoC with 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores, which the company managed to tape out and produce the first sample of using TSMC's 16FFC fabrication technology, should have been the company's primary design capability, but it will never be commercially released due to international restrictions.
Baikal via FritzchensFritz image
The Baikal BE-S1000 SoC's FCLGA-3467 packaging includes one, two, and four processors. No elaborate cooling systems are required due to the SoC's die size, which is around 607mm2, being comparable to Nvidia's AD102 graphics processor.
The BE-S1000 processor includes five PCIe 4.0 x16 (44) interfaces, a USB 2.0 controller, two 1GbE interfaces, and six 72-bit memory interfaces capable of supporting up to 768 GB of DDR4-3200 in total (i.e., 128GB per channel).
Baikal's BE-S1000 was positioned against AMD's 16-core EPYC 7351 (2.90 GHz) and Huawei's 48-core Kunpeng 920 in a number of benchmarks as part of its marketing campaign.
Locuza's Image
The Baikal BE-S1000 appears to be a brave effort to develop a server-grade CPU that might have replaced AMD and Intel processors in several servers, but it would have been released too late and slower than then-current processors from the x86 camp.
If the price had been correct, this might have been avoided (at least for some situations). As a result of Russia's brutal conflict in Ukraine, the BE-S1000 will only ever be a fascinating relic in laboratories.
