Twitter consumer Fritzchens Fritz (opens in new tab) has managed to acquire a pattern of Baikal Electronics’ 48-core BE-S1000 server-grade system-on-chip (SoC) and throw it below an infrared microscope to disclose its internals. As well as, some benchmark outcomes of the SoC have surfaced.
Baikal Electronics has developed a number of system-on-chips for various gadgets to switch x86 processors from PCs and varied compute home equipment made in Russia. Nonetheless, the top of the corporate’s design prowess ought to have been its BE-S1000 server-grade SoC with 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores, which the corporate managed to tape out and produce the primary pattern utilizing TSMC’s 16FFC fabrication know-how, however which can by no means be launched commercially because of sanctions towards Russia for its invasion in Ukraine.
The Baikal BE-S1000 SoC is available in an FCLGA-3467 bundle to work in uniprocessor, 2-way, and 4-way symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) configurations. The processor’s energy consumption is about 120W, so it doesn’t require any fancy cooling methods. The die dimension of the SoC is about 607mm², which is analogous to the die dimension of Nvidia’s AD102 graphics processor.
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Along with detailed die pictures of the BE-S1000 processor displayed by Fritzchens Fritz (opens in new tab), Locuza (opens in new tab) additionally revealed a chip floorplan with annotation.
The Baikal BE-S1000 (opens in new tab) organizes its 48 Artwork Cortex-A75 cores (working at 2 GHz) throughout 12 clusters, every containing 4 Arm Cortex-A75 cores with 512KB L2 cache per core and 2MB of unified L3 cache. As well as, the 32MB of L4 cache organized in 4 blocks accompany the quad-core clusters.
The BE-S1000 processor additionally has six 72-bit reminiscence interfaces supporting as much as 768 GB of DDR4-3200 with ECC reminiscence in complete (i.e., 128GB per channel), 5 PCIe 4.0 x16 (4×4) interfaces (three of which assist CCIX 1.0 to arrange 2-way and 4-way SMP configurations), one USB 2.0 controller, two 1GbE interfaces, and varied common goal I/O. As well as, the SoC options an interconnect by a coherent mesh community.
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Baikal positioned its BE-S1000 towards 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) in its advertising and marketing supplies revealed by Locuza (opens in new tab). As for efficiency, Baikal’s slides point out that the BE-S1000 that was alleged to hit the market in 2022 ~ 2023 would outperform Intel’s Xeon Gold 6148 (from 2017) by a considerable margin in varied sorts of benchmarks apart from HPLinpack (a supercomputer benchmark), which isn’t significantly shocking on condition that Cortex-A75 was not designed to run high-performance computing workloads with an FP64 precision.
Typically, whereas the Baikal BE-S1000 seems to be like a courageous try to develop a server-grade SoC that might change processors from AMD and Intel for some machines, the chip would have arrived too late and been slower than then-contemporary CPUs from the x86 camp. Probably, this might have been mitigated with the suitable worth (not less than for some instances). However due to Russia’s bloody struggle in Ukraine, the BE-S1000 will stay an fascinating artifact within the labs and can by no means turn into an precise product.
