Taiwan Export Ban Restricts Russia and Belarus to CPUs with Frequencies under 25 MHz

Tsing

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Taiwan has implemented new export restrictions that prevent Russia and Belarus from receiving decent CPUs.

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Does this include systems that were designed in Russia but are manufactured by TSMC?

Examples from wiki:

Baikal BE-M1000 ... The CPUs are made by TSMC in a 28nm process
Elbrus Elbrus-8SV ... Tech. node 28 nm, TSMC process
 
serpretetsky said:
Does this include systems that were designed in Russia but are manufactured by TSMC?
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I imagine it does - although only from the fabs located in Taiwan. TSMC also has a fab located in mainland China, and it wouldn't exactly be hard to have the chips ordered and papered to Mainland, and then... just keep going North to Russia.
 
Brian_B said:
I imagine it does - although only from the fabs located in Taiwan. TSMC also has a fab located in mainland China, and it wouldn't exactly be hard to have the chips ordered and papered to Mainland, and then... just keep going North to Russia.
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I wonder if that were the case if Taiwan would pressure TSMC to not fab for Russia from any of its plants regardless of where it is located.
 
serpretetsky said:
I wonder if that were the case if Taiwan would pressure TSMC to not fab for Russia from any of its plants regardless of where it is located.
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Pressure? Sure.

Succeed?

It's not in Taiwan's best interest to antagonize China, and you don't get a plant in China of any sort as a foreign entity without government oversight. I doubt their mainland staff will have a choice, push comes to shove.

Burticus said:
I have some 386's laying around if Rus is interested. I don't accept Rubles or potatos though
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We can (and should!) laugh, but for perspective, the F-22 baseline used 486s. Which were cutting edge when it was designed. Also, they work.

I shudder to imagine just how much of our modern consumer-facing computing is just... overhead. I'm betting that unless one is gaming or working some other compute-intensive content creation or simulation workload, that the overhead between actual compute work and everything else is like 99.99%.

We were running RTS games on 486s with multiplayer over dial-up. Once we hit a real performance wall, the next round of user-facing performance increases will come from better utilization of the hardware we have.
 
LazyGamer said:
We can (and should!) laugh, but for perspective, the F-22 baseline used 486s.
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Yeah it's amazing how much hardware you ~only~ need if you can optimize for it and target just exactly what it is you are wanting to do.

When I was in the service, we ran some very critical safety equipment. It was contained in 12 cabinets, each about 3'x3'x6' inside of a space about the size of a single car garage. The entire operation would easily have ran on a 486. Everything was entirely analog / 1960 relay based, except for one tank level controller - which used an 8080 processor just to maintain water level in what was essentially a very fancy float valve (albeit a very important one)
 
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Brian_B said:
Yeah it's amazing how much hardware you ~only~ need if you can optimize for it and target just exactly what it is you are wanting to do.

When I was in the service, we ran some very critical safety equipment. It was contained in 12 cabinets, each about 3'x3'x6' inside of a space about the size of a single car garage. The entire operation would easily have ran on a 486. Everything was entirely analog / 1960 relay based, except for one tank level controller - which used an 8080 processor just to maintain water level in what was essentially a very fancy float valve (albeit a very important one)
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If it ain't broke don't fix it. The only reason we replace hardware when we do is we can't take the risk of failure and these devices have a finite service life.
 
Grimlakin said:
The only reason we replace hardware when we do is we can't take the risk of failure and these devices have a finite service life.
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Well I can also see the efficiency angle.

In my example, you have 12 full size cabinets -- that eats a lot of real estate. That eats a lot of man-hours in service and calibration. That eats a lot of spare parts inventory. That eats a lot of power consumption. If you could consolodate all of that down to ... one piece of equipment that fits in a 2U rack mount... and can run diagnostics and calibrations with just the push of a single button - that's a significant savings.

Or in the IT world - if you have computations that run X% faster, or with Y% energy savings - that translates directly into cost savings right there, and you can calculate a Return on the investment.

You have a very good point about "it ain't broke" - and that's exactly why that ancient equipment is still there -- it's been proven to work beyond a shadow of a doubt, and nearly any failure mode you can think of has been witnessed, analyzed, and mitigated or planned around. And when you have an organization with effectively no limit to their budget, or man power, such as the Military -- they see nothing but risk. At least until their budget gets slashed.
 
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Brian_B said:
Well I can also see the efficiency angle.

In my example, you have 12 full size cabinets -- that eats a lot of real estate. That eats a lot of man-hours in service and calibration. That eats a lot of spare parts inventory. That eats a lot of power consumption. If you could consolodate all of that down to ... one piece of equipment that fits in a 2U rack mount... and can run diagnostics and calibrations with just the push of a single button - that's a significant savings.

Or in the IT world - if you have computations that run X% faster, or with Y% energy savings - that translates directly into cost savings right there, and you can calculate a Return on the investment.

You have a very good point about "it ain't broke" - and that's exactly why that ancient equipment is still there -- it's been proven to work beyond a shadow of a doubt, and nearly any failure mode you can think of has been witnessed, analyzed, and mitigated or planned around. And when you have an organization with effectively no limit to their budget, or man power, such as the Military -- they see nothing but risk. At least until their budget gets slashed.
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Depending on your area in IT you also run into diminishing returns on survivability of hardware. Sure the compute power available today means you can run what was in a 5 node cluster before in a singe 2u Chassis today... that doesn't mean it's the best route to go.

And for some software having a billion threads to run on just increases your licensing costs to astronomical levels and provides no real tangible benefit to performance day to day.

But yes IT has generational improvements to IPC, and Cores, and memory and storage.. and it adds up to increased performance per watt. Something we as desktop consumers don't care about. And being able to reduce that power footprint is a big win... BUT.

It's also a big risk... when you cut your footprint down too much you loose out on redundancy. It's always a balancing act and depending on the criticality of your hardware being able to deliver day to day is more important than the footprint... within reason.

Just some other things to think about... things you learn (or have learned.) in a long and storied career within the world of IT.
 
Grimlakin said:
It's also a big risk... when you cut your footprint down too much you loose out on redundancy. It's always a balancing act and depending on the criticality of your hardware being able to deliver day to day is more important than the footprint... within reason.
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Well, you're still not supposed to go full dagron smash on it all :ROFLMAO:

Gotta map out the logic and ensure that you maintain redundancy while reducing overall footprint.

Brian_B said:
And when you have an organization with effectively no limit to their budget, or man power, such as the Military -- they see nothing but risk. At least until their budget gets slashed.
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Budgets tend to ebb and flow with the political affiliation of the party in control of the Executive, but in general, they're not unlimited. Congress has the unlimited budget, the DOD is still held to account (if poorly). And it really is about managing risk all around.
 
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