Security News > 2022 > May > UK sanctions Russian microprocessor makers, banning them from ARM
The UK government added 63 Russian entities to its sanction list on Wednesday.
Among them are Baikal Electronics and MCST, the two most important chip makers in Russia.
The two sanctioned entities will now be denied access to the ARM architecture since Arm Ltd., the licensee, is based in Cambridge, England, and will have to comply with the sanctions.
Baikal BE-M1000, a 35 Watt using eight ARM Cortex A57 cores clocked at 1.5 GHz and an ARM Mali-T628 GPU clocked at 750 MHz. Baikal BE-S1000, a 120 Watt processor featuring 48 ARM cores clocked at 2.0 GHz. MCST Elbrus-8C, a 70 Watt processor featuring eight cores clocked at 1.3 GHz. MCST Elbrus-16S, a 16-core processor clocked at 2.0 GHz, capable of 1.5 TFLOP calculations, which is a tenth of what an Xbox Series X can achieve.
While these processors, and the much worse mid-tier and low-tier chips that carry the Baikal and MCST sticker, don't feature impressive performance, they could keep some vital parts of the Russian IT section going during shortages.
MCST recently boasted it's successfully filling the gap created in the national market, "Rushing to the rescue" of Russian businesses and critical organizations.