But before the sanctions were handed down, Baikal received several prototypes of its latest (and perhaps last) SoC from TSMC. Somehow, some of them have ended up.
In context: Russian chip maker Baikal Electronics was halfway to having an SoC series that spanned from eight cores to 48 before Russia invaded Ukraine and invited sanctions that crippled its nascent semiconductor industry.
But before the sanctions were handed down, Baikal received several prototypes of its latest (and perhaps last) SoC from TSMC. Somehow, some of them have ended up in the hands of a Russian enthusiast who’s shared them with Fritchens Fritz, a tremendously talented chip photographer.
Fritzchens Fritz wields his infrared microscope on both Twitter and Flickr.
This monstrous system on a chip is the BE-S1000. It was designed for server applications and has 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores. It features a 2 GHz all-core clock and a 120W TDP. It was manufactured on the TSMC 16FFC node and measures in at an enormous 607 mm2.
Annotations by Locuza and photograph by Fritzchens Fritz.
