The fact is that they use the architecture of the British company ARM. And the new sanctions include not only the freezing of foreign assets of ICST and Baykal Electronics, but also restrictions on their use of technology, including ARM architecture. This should stop the release of new processors.

Details of the new sanctions

• According to the source, Baykal Electronics has design and manufacturing licenses for all processors up to Baikal S (16 nanometers).
• However, the company has only project licenses for new processors Baykal M2, Baykal L, Baykal S2, which are currently under development.
• This means that the manufacturer only has the right to develop and test new processors in-house, but not to mass-produce them for resale to consumers.
• No major foreign chip manufacturer, UMC, Global Foundries or TSMC will agree to work without a Baykal Electronics production license. That is, the latter produces Baikal processors at its factories.

Interestingly, and not surprisingly, for the “high culture” of the occupiers, the “Kommersant” interlocutor admits that Russia may be looking for a factory that would violate ARM’s patent law.

There are several ways out: either look for a factory that will violate ARM’s patent law, or transfer their development to open processor architectures such as RISK V, MIPS, VLIW. But this will require a redesign of the entire processor, which will take two or three years and up to 1 billion rubles,
– says the source of the propaganda broadcast.

Russia has high hopes for these processors planning import substitution. By 2023, Baikal Electronics planned to release the first engineering models of the Baikal-L processor (12 nanometers, ARMv9 architecture) for tablets and laptops, and by 2025 – the first batches of Baikal-S2 (6 nanometers, ARMv9) for cloud computing centers. . Now these plans will have to look for an alternative, as long as they do not violate Russian patent law.

By the way, the ARM architecture is the basis of other Russian processors called “Scythian”. They are made according to the old 28 nanometer technological process that prevailed in early 2010. It is reported that the next version of the AYYA smartphone is working on these chips. Earlier we wrote that the shameful failure of the first version – AYYA T1 – did not prevent the manufacturer, the company “Smartekosistema”, from releasing the next version of this nonsense. However, now, probably, meaningless dreams about Russian smartphones will have to be put in a very deep drawer.