The developer of Elbrus processors will transfer their production from Taiwan

The developer of Elbrus processors is negotiating with Mikron to transfer their production to Zelenograd. Factory in Taiwan became unavailable due to sanctions,

The MCST company, which is the developer of the Russian Elbrus processors, is negotiating the possibility of transferring their production to the Russian Mikron factory. This was told to RBC by a source and confirmed by Konstantin Trushkin, Deputy General DIRECTOR for Marketing of the MCST. A spokesman for Mikron Group declined to comment.

Until now, Elbrus processors have been produced at the Taiwanese TSMC, whose capacities allow the production of processors according to the process technology from 90 nanometers (nm) to 5 nm. At the end of last year, TSMC announced the start of pilot production on a 3nm process and is working on a 2nm topology. However, after the start of a special military operation in Ukraine, TSMC stopped cooperation with Russian companies due to US sanctions . Due to restrictions, companies need to obtain a special license to EXPORT to RUSSIA high-tech products that use American technology. it is expected that the US authorities will issue such a license only in exceptional circumstances. At the same time processor manufacturers Intel and AMD refused to supply their products to Russia.

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According to the information on the official website of the MCST, the line of Elbrus processors contains microcircuits in topology from 130 nm, and the company's most advanced processor is manufactured using the 16 nm process technology. The users of these processors are primarily the power and state structures of Russia. As Konstantin Trushkin explained, speaking at the annual meeting of the Association of Software Developers (ARPP) "Domestic Soft" at the end of April (an RBC correspondent was present at the event), Mikron makes it possible to produce processors using 90 nm technology, in addition, there are various "difficult moments" that prevent the domestic factory from entering full-fledged mass production. At the same time, Trushkin said that the MCST was considering two options for action in the face of sanctions:

Now Trushkin explains that sanctions have closed access to foreign factories for MCST, so the company is considering switching to Russian facilities: “We see that domestic factories can create worthy processors with sovereign Russian technologies for critical information infrastructure (this includes communication networks and information systems government agencies, energy, financial, telecommunications and a number of other companies. - ), information security and other markets. To achieve sufficient practical performance, we see a large reserve in reworking the source code and optimizing the software for the Elbrus architecture. Whether the company will continue to produce processors based on 45 nm and more modern technologies, the MCST representative did not specify.

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According to SPARK, 99.88% of the MCST shares are owned by six citizens of Russia, another 0.08% by the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology. S.A. Lebedev Academy of Sciences (JSC ITMIVT), 0.04% - from JSC Research Institute of Super-Computers.

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The main owner of Mikron is a joint venture between AFK Sistema and Rostec, Element. At the end of April, Kommersant reported that by 2025 Mikron plans to increase the production of silicon wafers for the production of 180–90 nm chips from 3,000 to 6,000 per month. For this, Mikron will need, according to the publication, about 10 billion rubles. - they are planned to be obtained as part of the government-developed national project for the development of electronics until 2030.

According to the director of the Association of Computer and Information Technology Enterprises (APKIT) Nikolai Komlev, there are many tasks for which chips with not the highest resolution would be enough. “The performance issues for such tasks are not so critical, besides, the speed or performance of the final product can be increased through well-tuned software,” he said. However, according to him, in order to increase the speed of the product, adapted software for Elbrus processors is needed, with which there are also problems. Komlev notes that investing in such a development is not entirely promising, given the obviously small circulation of the Elbrus produced. “On the one hand, releasing it in circulations of less than millions, tens of millions is not very profitable.

How the transfer of production will affect Elbrus

In December, Anton Zhbankov, a representative of the laboratory of new technological solutions of Sberbank, said that after testing two types of servers on Elbrus processors, the bank was dissatisfied with the results. “The technical conclusions are quite simple: very weak compared to Intel Xeon - little memory, slow memory, few cores, low frequency. Functional requirements are catastrophically not met, ”he pointed out.

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According to RBC's source in the IT market, it will take at least a year and several billion rubles to transfer production to Mikron MCST. At the same time, he called the transition to 90 nm "a big step back", which shows that "in the near future you should not count on either your own production using 28 nm technology, or reaching an agreement with other foreign factories." According to this interlocutor, Elbrus produced at Mikron can be used "except in thin clients (compact computers without a hard drive, the main operating system of which is loaded on the server. -), cash registers or in some special application" . “There will be few computers with such processors, and software developers will have to adapt it, which they are unlikely to be interested in. But this is the only team in Russia

Nikolai Komlev noted that TSMC's production of processors is cheaper, even taking into account the fact that the Taiwanese factory produces more technologically advanced products. “For the production of microcircuits, materials and components are needed, which are delivered, including from abroad. Taking into account the fact that the circulation of Elbrus processors produced at Mikron will be less than at the Taiwanese factory, the production at the Russian enterprise will cost MCST more, ”he explained. According to the executive director of the Association of Electronics Developers and Manufacturers (ARPE) Ivan Pokrovsky, the production of processors according to the topology of 90 nm will cost "at best, tens of percent more expensive than 28 nm." But he could not name a specific amount, referring to the fact that various factors influence it.

According to Maxim Koposov, director of the Promobit company (manufacturer of BITBLAZE servers and storage systems based on Russian Elbrus processors), the production of processors at the Mikron factory will cost MCST approximately twice as much as at TSMC (the cost of one Elbrus processor with the same area at TSMC is about 40 thousand rubles, while at Mikron it is about 80 thousand rubles). At the Taiwanese factory, according to the interlocutor of RBC, the logistics chains with the supply of the necessary components, chemicals, iron and others are better established than in any other production. According to him, TSMC produced about 10-20 thousand Elbrus processors a year.

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