THE CRUNCH
Russian chip designers put homegrown silicon through its paces at the Microelectronics 26 forum in Sochi, and chose a fittingly nostalgic benchmark: retro games. The demos, documented by RISC-V and Rust enthusiast Dmitrii Kuznetsov, spanned three companies and three architectures. Baikal Electronics showed a business card-sized controller and an NES-styled console called "Ushka", both built on its BE-U1000 microcontroller, playing what appears to be Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
The BE-U1000 is a modest part: three 32-bit RISC-V CloudBear cores clocked between 100 and 200 MHz, 256 KB of flash and 192 KB of SRAM, packed into a 10x10 mm chip aimed at robotics, automation and IoT rather than gaming. Elvis took a more capable route, with a board built around its Hypercom-U SoC, which pairs four Arm Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.2 GHz with a PowerVR GPU, running the original Super Mario as its demo. That chip targets multimedia, navigation and single-board computers.
Rounding out the display were MCST's Elbrus-based PCs, though the event photos offered few specifics. Elbrus is a Russian-developed architecture pitched at desktop and server use; the machines shown were likely based on the 16-core Elbrus-16S or the Elbrus-2S3 for mini-PCs and laptops.
The playful framing belies a serious backdrop. Sanctions have largely cut Russian buyers off from Western hardware, and the government previously ordered the creation of a high-end domestic games console, an initiative that produced little and whose result was not on display in Sochi.