"Last year, the Russian government announced that it doesn't want to rely on Intel and AMD chips from the U.S. anymore and will focus more on using homegrown chips from Russia."
[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/baikal-t1-mips-cpu-omnishie...
"Last year, the Russian government announced that it doesn't want to rely on Intel and AMD chips from the U.S. anymore and will focus more on using homegrown chips from Russia."
[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/baikal-t1-mips-cpu-omnishie...
You can make an argument that it is still an improvement, because there are no obvious binary blobs required by the system. But in this case, I would recommend going for one of the many Chinese ARM cores -- at least you can buy them easily.
The early models implemented a proprietary VLIW architecture with enterprise-y features (like hardware-tagged pointers, probably borrowed-ish from Itanium) with a dynamic binary translation layer for x86 compatibility on top, not sure if they still do that or perhaps the other way around now.