It’s amazing to me how much money Russia’s dumping into this drive for independence from Western tech (exchanging it for dependence on Chinese tech, but that’s another story), as if that’s going to be a long-term direction of the country. There’s precisely one person in Russia who actually thinks it’s a good idea, and he’s 71. Whoever succeeds Putin will inevitably have to mend those bridges, and the West will be all too happy to play along if only to prevent Russia from becoming a full-blown ally of China.
Also, Russian customers still have access to all the Intel/AMD/Nvidia tech they want; even if they’re not supplied officially, pipelines have been established for importing through neutral third countries. My personal PC has a 4090, a 5800X3D and an ATX 3.0 PSU, none of which were ever officially available in Russia since they released after Feb 2022.
Whoever comes in after Putin will probably be of the same mind and possibly be even more extreme.
It will be interesting, if these cpus are used in kamikaze drones or swarm drones
Old rc aircraft like plane or helicopter don’t even have microncontroller, they stabilize only with pilot input and mechanical gyro, and can be equipped with camera and vtx for BLOS control.
Modern rc aircraft does have eletronics components for better control/smaller size, but the computing requirement is small for it to stabilize. Plane in particular is stable by design, so the computing requirement is so small that the radio receiver directly drive servo output from pilot input and electronics gyro, without the use of external control circuit. Multicopter also needs little computing to hover, but quite a bit more for aggresive maneuver (currently flight controller using stm32f4 is very popular, which has clock speed of 168MHz, much lower than commerical computer’s but is more than enough for the purpose)
Russia certainly can make their own manual suicide drone without importing any parts. Autonomous drone otoh is hard because it requires computer vision algorithm running inference to detect target, which requires edge gpu (which is nvidia only) or computer-like cpu to run real-time with usable update rate. Trade-off can be made by lower camera resolution to the extreme for faster processing speed, at the cost of not being able to capture feature that enable more sophisticate differentiation.
I wish the chinese just used RISC V. They are using open source software anyway, why not use open hardware? I remember watching a video from CGTN about their new RISC V processor that runs Linux, with performance near i5.
But anyway, The Russians better follow GPL
Does this really amount to a “pivot”? It sounds like they just updated their toolchain and binaries to support LoongArch - presumably Basalt is also continuing to support other architectures too:
Russia-based Basalt SPO has been recompiled to support Chinese Loongson processors based on the LoongArch architecture
The company says the product is offered ‘as is,’ and its commercial distributives will be available later.
The distro is based on the unstable, experimental branch of the Sisyphus project repository, which developers use to test new ideas and developments, including support for various processor architectures, reports CNews. The distro is available for download, but a stable release with LoongArch support is set for Q1 2024.
It is an interesting sign that LoongArch availability in Russia is high enough that at least one company put a fair bit of work into adding support, but it seems premature to claim anyone is actually pivoting away from Intel/ARM, especially all of Russia.