Russia's 'Baikal' benchmark compares Intel and Huawei chips

【Lansheng Technology Information】Russian CPU manufacturer Baikal previously launched the Baikal-S server CPU, which was hyped by local media as a challenger to Intel and AMD. However, CPU benchmarks from Russian news outlet CNews have now surfaced and present a completely different picture.

It is understood that Baikal-S was released in October 2021, when the first batch of engineering samples of the new product arrived in Russia from Taiwan's TSMC. The processor is manufactured using a 16 nm process technology, has 48 ARM Cortex-A75 cores, six channels of DDR4 3200 MHz memory - up to 768 GB per socket (128 GB per channel), and supports hardware virtualization.

The chip interconnect consists of three CCIX x16 interfaces; each lane runs at 16 Gbps. The set of I/O interfaces includes 80 PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes (48 lanes are shared by the CCIX interface), two 1 Gb Ethernet RGMII lanes, and a USB 2.0 ULPI.

Baikal-S was originally designed to run at a clock frequency of 2 GHz. The developers assumed that he would be able to work stably in more advanced modes, but they were later able to fully verify this by working on a serial board and achieving more efficient cooling.

Therefore, the indicators provided by the company will regularly take into account the parameters of Baikal-S with frequencies of 2GHz and 2.5GHz.

In terms of testing competitors, Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 and Huawei's Kunpeng 920 were chosen. Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 was released in 2019, with a design process of 14nm, 20 ARM cores, and a frequency of 2.1GHz. Baikal Electronics told CNews that the processor was chosen because of its similar performance and price to the Baikal-S at the time of the Russian chip's launch.

The Huawei Kunpeng 920 was released in September 2019, and at launch, the creators called it the "highest performance ARM-based processor." The Kunpeng 920 7nm process is the most advanced. The self-developed TaiShan v110 architecture is also 48 cores, with a fixed main frequency of 2.6GHz, a L3 cache of 48MB, and a thermal design power consumption of up to 158W. One of the reasons Baikal Electronics chose it was its similar architecture to Baikal-S - AWP V8.

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