[tribaal]

I guess it is purely political.

Russia wants to be independent from the US for computers, because they fear (rightfully) American chips to be bugged.

Having slow, expensive chips made in Russia is probably more interesting to certain agencies than fast and cheap American chips - or relying on typewriters :)

[fzltrp]

China has a team developping a mips like architecture, with several produced iterations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

I don't know if Russia has the industry to mass produce it, but surely it has the skilled people to design it, and it may probably use foreign fabs for the remaining steps if necessary.

As for the software, with an established ISA, they may quickly leverage exising open source solutions. Of course, Windows and OSX support will be a problem (given that they are the major desktop players).

Politic or not, they know it's doable.

[tankenmate]

If they are concerned about bugged hardware (which is difficult to do and expensive), I don't think "bugged" software (which is much cheaper to replace) will be on their shopping list either...

[fzltrp]

True, what I meanbt is that the consumer software marketplace is originally built around those platforms. During the last several years, the market has been largely fragmented by tablets, but I have the impression they still represent a major segment. That said, industries and services may more easily accomodate the absence of these players.

[nmrm]

If you're just worried about bugged hardware, why develop a new architecture? Can't you use your own clean room implementation of an existing architecture?

[tribaal]

Yes, you're right, they could. But I suspect the decision is made of things like:

- If it proves to be actually good, they might actually sell some of those chips, too (it's developing their local high-tech sector. Even a tiny piece of the market is better than none at all, especially if their own agencies kickstart it).

- It highers the cost for foreign intelligence to write software for that platform: their arsenal of viruses and trojans are completely useless. Unless you acquire detailed specifications of the platform, find some test chips, develop new software and finally infect your target... Takes time and money.

- They get some (positive, for once) international press.

- They can parade how awesome mother Russia is to their own nationalist ego.

[fzltrp]

Someone else mentioned that the architecture is based of Sparc technology (Sun's line of CPUs, which is a mips derivative iirc). It's hardly a completely new architecture.

[Narishma]

Sparc isn't a derivative of MIPS.

[fzltrp]

Thanks for correcting me: indeed, it's an open architecture which was used by Sun, Fujitsu and TI for their CPUs, and it's unrelated to MIPS.

[fzltrp]

However, how difficult would it be for a foreign fab to rig the design of a customer and include backdoors?

[oleks]

Yes. Bugging your own chips is cheaper than bugging Intel's.

[ten7]

The Americans should probably fear bugged Russian processors too, right?

[seanmcdirmid]

We are more afraid of counterfeit china-fabbed ASICs; even the US military has been burned by these. With more fabbing done in china, I guess the problems could get worse.

[tribaal]

Well yeah, if they were to buy made-in-russia processors. Which is very unlikely.