Russia wants to replace US computer chips with local processors

by kator • 12 years ago

41 37 12 years ago

Decentralization is never a bad thing.

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

Except for loss of economies of scale. Semiconductor fabs and nuclear reactors are just about tied for the most expensive industrial plants you can build.

listic2• 12 years ago

It is not clear whether Russia is in fact planning to build its own top-notch (28 nm, 16 nm) semiconductor fabs. I assume they won't, at least not at first. Building "your own" ARM processors based on stock IP cores licensed from ARM Holdings and fabricating them on commercially available foundries in Europe or China looks like a reasonable way to escape the US-based Intel and AMD and should not be ridiculously expensive.

kator2• 12 years ago

I find it interesting that not so long ago we were all discussing back doors Chinese manufacturers might be putting in our systems. Now the world is worried about what we put in our systems that we export.

It seems over time this will create some very interesting market dynamics and all sorts of "secure" clones of various technologies in different parts of the world.

This is the beginning of the real cyber wars.. When technology is so complicated you can only trust things you've built from scratch with your own two hands. And even then you might have created some massive back door that could be taken advantage of without you knowing.

Seems like the basis for a SciFi Movie.. :-)

thesimpsons1022• 12 years ago

my guess is we are going to see the rise of open source hardware. and hey, you'll probably be able to 3d print it.

vitd• 12 years ago

The cynic in me says that they don't want to avoid the US's surveillance so much as they want to insert their own. If it were another European country, I might assume otherwise, but Russia?

iSnow• 12 years ago

If the Itar-tass article is right, this makes no sense because the chips are destined for government computers and state-run companies. There are probably easier ways to snoop on those computers.

And why would Russia not be afraid of the NSA, after all they are a prime target.

muuh-gnu• 12 years ago

European countries are not directly threatened militarily by the US, but Russia is. Europe is being merely exploited economically.

But even now that the Europeans are fully aware of being spied upon by the US, they can not do anything about it without hurting themselves in the process. Europeans are weaklings, and not willing to endure the smallest amount of pain, even to avoid bigger pain down the road.

rlanday• 12 years ago

Remember when the US government kept talking about the dangers of another country writing something like Stuxnet before it came out that they were behind it?

roc• 12 years ago

"Now the world is worried about what we put in our systems that we export."

That's not remotely a new state of affairs. Nor is it new for them -- Russia in particular -- to have very good reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage

old-gregg• 12 years ago

The rumors say [1] the "Baikal" processor is not a domestic design, but a quad-core 64-bit ARM-based piece, so it's swapping a US design for a British one...

I'm guessing they're building a FAB to manufacture it locally. Not that big of a news, actually.

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTcyNjU

informatimago• 12 years ago

They should plan for an international market, not only for Russia government agencies... I would definitely buy one.

throwaway293692• 12 years ago

Also for private European citizens it makes sense to buy hardware that is manufactured entirely in China or Russia. European governments have a long history of ruthlessly harrassing and destroying the lives of innocent citizens:

http://courses.umass.edu/comm342/taubin.html

["The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" is worth reading, better than the movie.]

I'm not claiming that things are better in China, but at least Chinese authorities gathering data would rarely matter to a European citizen.

throwaway29369b2• 12 years ago

Please. Böll wrote about West Germany. But even in the 70s the situation was much, much better than it has ever been in Russia or China in the last century. And this includes both, freedom and social welfare. I can elaborate if needed.

throwaway293692• 12 years ago

I did not claim that the situation was as bad as in Russia or China. In Germany government harassment of "terrorists" and other unwanted elements was bad enough though. Heinrich Böll's treatment is well known.

It is true though that unlike today, Germany did have an actual terrorism problem in the 1970s.

asgard1024• 12 years ago

So could someone design a "safe" operating system? Such that would distribute the workload on two computers from two manufacturers, so that if either computer was compromised by a different party, they wouldn't get any meaningful result?

Someone• 12 years ago

Yes. You just did (more or less).

Someone even could _write_ a "safe" operating system. That's what NASA did (they worried about bugs, not security, but that doesn't matter much) for the space shuttle. http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue132/92_Space_shut...:

"Since the computers are essential, NASA decided to use five identical computers in operation for critical periods like launch and landing. Four of the units operate together, and if one has a different result, it's presumed wrong and is "outvoted." The fifth computer is programmed separately from the other four and acts as a backup to prevent possible generic software errors from causing problems."

And, of course, for that application, you cannot have the "won't get a meaningful result" outcome often. That's why they made the effort to make that unlikely (http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff)

Becuase of the extra effort needed, the resulting OS may lack features, though.

rz2k• 12 years ago

Others have commented on here before about how that idea is incorporated into flight control systems.

Here's an example with the Boeing 777 that uses separate architectures:

The aircraft has triple redundant digital autopilot and flight director designed by Rockwell Collins. The BAE Systems (formerly Marconi Avionics) triple digital primary flight computers provide control limits and commands flight envelope protection. Each of the three primary flight computers contains three different and separate set of 32-bit microprocessors, Motorola, Intel and AMD, to manage the functions of fly-by-wire.

- http://777boeing.com/boeing-777-cockpit/

airplane• 12 years ago

If I remember correctly, that doesn't mean all three autopilots are talking to each other discussing what the best course of action is, it just means that when one fails or is shut off by the pilot that the next auto pilot system in line gets control.

If I also remember correctly, subsequent backup auto pilot systems usually only do the basics, so they can't compare and contrast with the first main auto pilot system on a lot of different actions.

kjs33• 12 years ago

They also write it in Ada to prevent many issues.

AaronFriel• 12 years ago

Not really, what you're describing is profoundly difficult to do, and probably intimately related to a couple concepts in theoretical computer science:

1. Byzantine fault tolerance

Does your system maintain functioning even in the face of arbitrary adversaries embedded in the system?

2. Homomorphic cryptography

Can you execute meaningful computations on untrusted computers such that someone with total physical control could not discern the nature of the data or the computations being run?

Both problems are monstrously hard, open problems. They both impose extremely large computational costs as well, albeit in different ways. It's doubtful that an agency will consider these cost effective barring some radical innovation.

Edit: It looks like the two other replies address the issue of "suppose I have one or more systems that might fail, but not in an adversarial way." Intelligence agencies do not like to make that assumption, and so what is fine for NASA may not suffice to answer your quandary. NASA may produce 3, 5, 7, or more identical computers which then operate via a voting protocol to act. Unfortunately, if one of those machines is compromised, so is the data on it, and I am not sure what proofs NASA has for the reliability of their system if the machine could be compromised to produce arbitrary output.

Retric• 12 years ago

The voting approach works you just need 2n+1 computers from different manufactures to protect from n compromised designs.

The issue with 2 is even if they can't get information an easy DOS attack is a useful and you can't tell which is correct. So, 3 manufactures protects you if 1 is working for the enemy but not 2.

kator2• 12 years ago

At one point IBM mainframes used to run the same instructions on multiple cores to avoid potential errors introduced by gamma radiation or hardware failures. The engineer who explained this to me said that as cpu's get smaller the potential for gamma radiation strikes to cause calculation errors grows or damage to circuits that could cause long term defects in their processing.

pagekicker• 12 years ago

They tried this in the Cold War. Didn't work. Will fail again for same reasons.

owenversteeg• 12 years ago

I'm a vintage calculator collector (one of maybe 30 left in the world) and I think it's interesting that the USSR tried to do this in the 70s with calculators. It didn't work well.

As a result of the effort, thousands of American calculators were disassembled and reassembled with Soviet cases and logos but American parts inside, so that Soviet bureaucrats thought they were using calculators made in the USSR. In reality, only a few calculators were made entirely in the USSR, and they were below the quality of American/Japanese/English calculators.

diminish• 12 years ago

when i was talking with a lot of ex-soviet raised people, one thing they mention as a failure for the warsaw pact was the inability to develop a competitive electronic and computer industry.

hangonhn• 12 years ago

Sure but this isn't the USSR anymore. I don't know to what degree the relevant things are different. For one, Russia is nominally capitalist -- their properties are a bit iffy at best though. Compared to the USSR, Russia is considerably more open and free. And that might be just enough for good ideas to flourish and good R&D to happen.

Intellectual freedom and capitalism are more of a gradient than categorical. China is another example of this. They have been successful in some of their R&D efforts despite not being a Western liberal democracy. China has in fact produced their own chips, even if they aren't as good as what Intel and AMD are capable of.

kjs33• 12 years ago

The Chinese Loongson processors are MIPS64 architecture and fabricated by STmicro (French company). So one could debate how home grown they are.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

I'd like to win the lottery and ride a unicorn to work!

Seriously though, the costs associated with building modern chips are ridiculous. So much so the much of the future R&D work is being done by consortiums of companies like Sematech, who literally have billions of member company and government dollars invested in development.

jimbobimbo• 12 years ago

The rule of thumb whenever you hear about a big hairy audacious government project like this in Russia is: assume that someone had figured out how to fleece a bunch of taxpayer's money off that. 99% the project won't go anywhere, but all key people will get paid.

nobullet• 12 years ago

Good luck, Russia, with sending yourself to dinosaurs.

walshemj• 12 years ago

I am sure still have the designs for those knock off ICL mainframes they copied from the single one they brought back in the 60's :-)

kjs33• 12 years ago

The Soviets have a long history of "copying" and locally fabricating clones of many western computer designs down to the chip level. See: http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_convers...

Russia wants to replace US computer chips with local processors

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