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Comment by fosk | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know if Russia produces any more chips in any meaningful capacity?

Are there any Russian investments in this space?

They have a number of fabs plus their own Elbrus architecture which is used in the military and even has some commercial use.

This video is a couple of years old but worth watching:

Russian semiconductor production - Mikron plant (English subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVczz3uU3j4

We visited the Mikron factory in Zelenograd, not to be confused with the American memory manufacturer Micron. For us it was a very interesting and unusual experience — to see the production of microprocessors, domestic at that, with our own eyes. No less interesting were the interviews that we managed to get from Mikron specialists — we talked about Global Foundries and Intel, discussed the problems they face, the new process nodes, including 7nm, and much more.

There are some chip factories with old node sizes. I think they're used for military or something like this. There are plans to build more modern chip factories, but I doubt that they'll materialize.

Russia has good experience in designing CPUs, but they relied on Taiwan to produce those.

Probably the most likely scenario for future is that they'll continue designing CPUs and will print them on Chinese fabs. China has huge investments.

I've been actually wondering recently: how much of a "chip design and manufacturing edge" does a country need for military equipment? I would guess things like targeting systems and radars don't need the latest CPU or GPU technology, but how far can one go back, where's the "edge of diminishing returns" for military chip designs? Late 80's? Late 90's?

People have been giving Russians a hard time for using "washing machine parts" which are basically just off the shelf commodity chips. But they are sufficient for running the calculations needed.

I think the radar alone could use an absurd amount of processing power.

Does Elbrus count?

https://www.techradar.com/news/this-russian-cpu-annihilates-...

Supporting 16TB of RAM is pretty impressive actually.

Support for 16 TB of RAM is not impressive at all, actually. It just means that that the memory address bus is 46 bits wide. For comparison, AWS has offered 24 TB servers since 2019 based on Intel Xeon for SAP HANA in-memory databases: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-high-memory-update-new-...

That Russian CPU is also PCIe 3.0 in an era where PCIe 5.0 is becoming the standard. Similarly, DDR4 in the DDR5 era.

Can they manufacture these in volume? With good yields? Can they keep it up even if nobody will sell them chip fab machines and parts?

It would be, if it worked.

https://worldnewsera.com/news/finance/everything-is-gone-rus...

Wow, I haven't heard of these "catastrophic failures" previously... that's a bummer.

The previous generation certainly worked.

Is there an article that explains this in more technical detail?

I’d call it a lucky accident, given the context - Russia would be harder to defeat otherwise. As for reasons - I’m guessing the usual, nobody wants to work on this, because pay is crap and, well, and I’m guessing many folks don’t want to work for nazis. That’s also why Russia can’t manufacture tanks anymore.

https://www.techspot.com/news/94233-russia-plans-manufacture...

I'm pretty sure they get all their stuff from Taiwan like everybody else.

there's this weird Russian VLIW core called Elbrus. I think it exists for national security purposes, to have some completely sovereign design the Kremlin can trust.

they're really hard to get ahold of in the West.

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