Baikal T1 is a Dual Core MIPS P5600 Communication Processor

When allegations surfaced that the NSA messed with devices manufactured by US companies, and possibly other, government of geopolitical significance started to take measures. For instance, China may have removed Apple and Cisco products from its list of approved products due to security reasons, and Russia decided to design its own Baikal processors to replace Intel and AMD solutions. At the time of the announcement, Baikal M and M/S chip were supposed to be the first ones and based on ARM Cortex A57 cores, but Imagination Technologies recently announced that Russia based Baikal Electronics was working on Baikal T1 communication processor with two MIPS P5600 cores.

Some of the specifications include:

• CPU – Dual core MIPS 5600 processor @ 1.2 GHz with 1MB L2 cache
• Memory – DDR3 controller
• Storage – SATA 6Gbps controller and PHY
• Connectivity – 2x Gigabit Ethernet controller, 1x 10Gigabit Ethernet controller and PHY
• USB 2.0 controller
• PCIe 3.0 controller and PHY
• GPIO, I2C, UART, SPI
• Power consumption – 5W (total)
• Package and process – 25x25mm package, manufactured with 28nm process technology

Baikal-T1 processor targets telecommunications, industrial automation and embedded systems. There was no word on supported operating systems, with the only reference to software being “the SoC comes with a set of extensible software based on open source code”, so it’s likely it will run Linux and leverage GNU tools.

The processor is close to being fully developed, as engineering samples are available to developers now, and Baikal-T1 based commercial solutions are expected by the end of 2015.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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