UK bans Russian chip makers from licensing Arm architecture
Government has added the Russian processor developers Baikal Electronics and MCST to its sanctions list
The UK government last week added the two major Russian processor developers, Baikal Electronics and MCST (Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies), to its sanctions list.
These two firms are among the 63 companies have been added to the consolidated list and are now subject to an asset freeze.
The move means that Russian firms will be unable to develop and manufacture processors based on the Arm architecture because the licensee, Arm Ltd., is based in the UK, and must comply with the government's sanctions.
In March, the US placed sanctions on both firms, as well as other Russian developers of integrated processors.
"The purpose of this provision is to encourage Russia to cease actions destabilising Ukraine or undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine," the government said.
In March, American chipmakers AMD, Intel and Nvidia suspended their supply to Russia. IBM also halted shipments after Ukraine requested cloud computing and software businesses in the US to stop doing business with Russia.
This has prevented Russia from obtaining the basic components required to build and run data centres in the country.
Because of the new sanctions announced by the UK, Baikal and MCST no longer have access to modern Arm architectures, which are required for producing advanced chips.
However, it should be noted that while Arm cannot continue to provide IP authorisation to Russian chip design firms, the IP that has previously been allowed will not be affected. To put it another way, the biggest impact is on Arm IPs that have yet to be licenced.
Baikal Electronics, which formerly designed semiconductors using the MIPS instruction set (Baikal-T series), has switched to the Arm architecture in recent years.
The firm's Baikal-M, Baikal-S, and Baikal-L series are all based on Arm architecture and are mostly sent to TSMC for foundry. However, TSMC is currently unable to produce Baikal chips due to the US sanctions on Russian firms.
According to experts, Russian chip developers will now also be forced to obtain a sanction-free processor architectural IP licensee or switch to open architectures like MIPS, RISC-V and others.
Some analysts also believe Russian firms may soon run out of equipment and will have to shut down operations if AMD and Intel CPUs, as well as servers from the big vendors, are not available.
While MCST has developed Elbrus processors, they can't compete with EPYCs or Xeons in terms of performance, and the servers based on them are judged unsuitable by Sber, one of the country's largest cloud providers.
In April 2022, the Russian government announced a 3.19 trillion ruble ($38.2 billion) investment to combat this, although increasing domestic production will take many years.
Russian foundries will be ready to produce 28nm chip by 2030, according to the most optimistic predictions.