Baikal Electronics, one of Russia's major processor developers, has been struggling in the wake of sanctions imposed by the US and UK governments following Russia's invasion of...
Sanctions have crippled Baikal's production and packaging capabilities
Why it matters: Global sanctions against Russian companies have worked in at least one respect: Baikal Electronics can no longer supply enough chips to meet the country's needs, and half of the chips it produces are defective. Russia is working to build up its domestic capabilities, but it is unclear whether it can catch up.
Baikal Electronics, one of Russia's major processor developers, has been struggling in the wake of sanctions imposed by the US and UK governments following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Until then, the company ordered the production of chips, including their packaging, from TSMC.
The Taiwan-based chipmaker promptly stopped shipping processors that year because of the sanctions. The sanctions also blocked the Russian company from licensing Arm technology. Baikal, which switched from the Baikal-T series MIPS instruction set architecture to Arm years ago, used the technology in its Baikal-M, -S, and -L series chips.
The supply restrictions forced the company to turn inward to produce packaged and tested silicon. Russian business news outlet Vedomosti recently revealed that about half of the processors packaged in Russia are defective. A source told the paper that the failures are due to equipment that is not configured correctly and not having enough properly trained technicians for the chip packaging.
Apparently, exploding television sets were the leading cause of fires in Russian apartments in the 80s and 90s (per Adam Curtis' TraumaZone). Except this time you're literally holding it.
Since Putin and the trolls here on Lemmy claim that the Russian economy is booming, this must mean that Russian chip manufacturing sucked even more before Russia started using torture, rape and mass murder to try to invade Ukraine.
Note the "try"... Because, damn do they suck at invading other countries too....
If you care about Ukraine, you should start taking this more seriously. Outside of your echo-chamber, Russia has proved resilient to sanctions and their ability to manifacture vital military goods in some crucial areas outpace the west, and by far outpace what is avaliable to Ukraine.
The much hoped for ukrainian counteroffensive yeilded nothing, and instead Russia is slowly gaining ground, allthewhile expanding its army with new, fresh units and learning to work with or around their shortcomings. Ukraine doesn't have anything to put its hope to other than simple endurance. And that's something that Russia has always had a lot of. The outlook is grim.
There are two important sides to this and you are only focusing one of them.
One is of course supporting Ukraine, as you point out, but what is also extremely important is not to let Russia get away with their obvious bullshit propaganda.
Russia is working hard on getting rid of the sanctions. One of the main tools used are to try to get people in the West to believe to Russian economy is unaffected.
It is not.
(If it was, Putin wouldn't fx deal with North Korea like they've been doing the last year.)
So if no one was calling out Putin and his useful idiots on fx Facebook or Lemmy, how long do you think the public in the West would support Ukraine?
If you care about Ukraine, you should start taking this more seriously.
The American response to any international conflict is to call your opponents weak, soy, and gay, then spend the next 13 years grinding it out in a hellish knife fight that decimates the conflict zone and a dozen surrounding regions while complaining that they're not fighting fairly.
The much hoped for ukrainian counteroffensive yeilded nothing
Nonsense. It killed a zillion Russian soldiers, by Russia's own accounting, which probably means it killed ten zillion in fact. The only good Slav is a dead Slav, and we're going to obliterate the entire Russian population at this rate. More bloody dismemberment via aerial bombardment is always something to get excited about, even if an equal number of Ukrainians are shoved into the meat grinder in the process.
I don't think it's booming by any means, but it's definitely not collapsing in a way that many assumed.
Perhaps Putin doesn't give a fuck, perhaps it's because they have enough reserves to keep things going for x months/years, who knows. I would love to see them lose their reserves and truly start to look at the position they've put themselves in. That's when Putin's leadership will be questioned at a higher level, and the idea of "one mother state" will be viewed as a disaster.
The masters never cares about the people. Putin still lives the same way he did before in his palace.
Russia will most likely not collapse (as in "total chaos") as long as China, India, Brasil and other countries support them in their colonization efforts.
But it will bring them down on their knees and it will, if the West somehow is able to deliver ammunition etc, force Russia to end their war in Ukraine.
I'm not optimistic, especially not since the Americans are about to vote for the Russian asset in the upcoming election, but hope is the last thing that leaves you....
To be fair, the Russian economy is actually doing well. I'm pretty sure it had the most growth out of any G7 nation the past year.
These sanctions aren't having the effect that a lot of you would want to believe. It's actually having the opposite, forcing Russia to rely on domestic production once again instead of the world market.
Also, there will be serious long-term effects due to lack of workers. Millions have fled, died, or been permanently injured, and Russia was already facing a difficult demographic crunch.
Say what you will about Russia, but it had its fair share of amazing scientists.
I wonder if the next generation will rise from these restrictions or have they already been fed as fodder into the war machine?
The problem is so many talented and gifted young men fled the country as the war began. The UK intelligence agency estimates 1.3 million, those were families that had someone talented enough to work abroad and or had enough money to start over somewhere else. Not to mention the meat grinder...
I'm only seeing 16nm from the units produced by TSMC. Do you have something current that shows the domestically produced ones are also of that gate width?