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Russian Sanctions Retaliation Escalates: Dumps Intel/AMD And Now Foreign Cars

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/18/2014 18:48 -0400

Ignoring for one second yesterday disastrous air crash in Ukraine, the 'boomerang' of sanctions continues to be thrown back and forth between the US and Russia. Having restricted Russian firm's access to USD funding, Putin has come out swinging. His first act was to demand that state departments and state-run companies will no longer purchase PCs built around Intel or AMD processors (which might explain AMD's slashing their outlook); but now he has hit out at the heart of what has made America great (in the eyes of some) - banning the use of foreign cars for officials in favour of home-produced cars.

As Engadget reported recently,

Russia's policy on Western technology is clear: The country can live without it, especially if key issues like economic sanctions, NSA spying and GPS cooperation aren't resolved to its leader's satisfaction. It looks like this tough stance extends to US-designed computer chips too, as a Russian business newspaper is reporting that state departments and state-run companies will no longer purchase PCs built around Intel or AMD processors. Instead, starting in 2015, the government will order up to one million devices annually based on the "Baikal" processor, which is manufactured by a domestic company called T-Platforms. An interesting twist, however, is that the Baikal processor is actually based on an ARM (Cortex-A57) design, which means the East / West divorce isn't quite as complete as it might sound. It could also mean that many Russian bureaucrats won't get the chance to be a Mac or a PC: they'll have to use some sort of ARM-compatible, presumably Linux-based operating system instead.

And now Putin has gone after the auto sector... (via Reuters)

Top Russian officials may soon forfeit the sleek black Mercedes limousines that speed them through the Kremlin gates in favour of home-produced cars as part of a push to protect domestic industry threatened by Western sanctions over Ukraine.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said he had signed an order limiting purchase of imported cars for state and municipal officials - a move in line with Vladimir Putin's bid to increase self-reliance from engineering to defence, but carrying more symbolic than commercial importance.

...

To address the concerns, domestic producers Sollers , Kamaz and GAZ have been asked to design a car for government officials by the end of the year under a project known as "Cortege".

"We have drafted a resolution that bans the state and municipal purchase of certain types of foreign-made equipment and vehicles, notably such conspicuous issues as the purchase of vehicles for officials," the government's website quoted Medvedev as telling deputy ministers at a meeting on Monday.

* * *

As Putin recently opined, the boomerangs are coming home...

“The US is certainly one of the world’s leaders. At some point it seemed that it was the only leader and a uni-polar system was in place. Today it appears that is not the case. Everything in the world is interdependent and once you try to punish someone, in the end you will cut off your nose to spite your face,” he said.

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Sat, 07/19/2014 - 00:58 | 4976445 crtune

Sort of a different concept here: ARM processors (RISC type instruction set) are useful because they use low power, and take up very little space in devices. That is why you see processors like this in tablets, phones, and small devices (maybe LCD monitors, small "dongle" type devices, etc.). They typically have a 32 bit instruction set and do not perform anywhere near the level that regular (AMD / Intel type) processors in PC or Workstation roles do. These now have 64 bit instructions and fully 64 bit memory and register architecture. Although, much is written about the small device field because of the ubiquity of phones and tablets, the world of scientific or other math intensive computing is still ruled by the AMD / Intel processor PC or Workstation. This is due to what the processors can do.

Servers, for example almost always have Xeon type processors (AMD has a similar processor). So, here Russia is essentially saying they are content to hamstring their scientific level computing in order to deal with the current embargo. OK. In financial engineering , or high power financial analysis you will see the same sort of hardware you see in a digital efx post house: Dual Xeon processor workstations with either 8 gig main memory or even 16 gig, installed memory. For math intensive advanced work, the processors mentioned here (ARM) will be of little or no use.

So, this is Putin simply pretending that this is of no concern. Probably viewing the latest IRS scandal, he's reasoned that most American politicians know nothing about computing hardware.

Sat, 07/19/2014 - 01:00 | 4976447 crtune

So, this is Putin simply pretending that this is of no concern. Probably viewing the latest IRS scandal, he's reasoned that most American politicians know nothing about computing hardware.

Wed, 07/30/2014 - 01:06 | 5021293 napper

Gosh you can't even handle a basic task such as posting here correctly ONCE, and you want to pursue a discussion on the capabilities of processors?

Sat, 07/19/2014 - 01:02 | 4976451 crtune

So, this is Putin simply pretending that this is of no concern. Probably viewing the latest IRS scandal, he's reasoned that most American politicians know nothing about computing hardware.

Sat, 07/19/2014 - 13:00 | 4977189 Haager

I think you got stuck a mere 10yrs ago...

X86 is just a design as ARM is, CISC/RISC marks just the roots of the design but nowadays both are more likely to be called RISC-designs, whereas X86 is working with microcode. The code-family or that it's RISC/CISC doesn't have much to do with power-consumption itself. It may amaze you that servers since long were working with CPUs with RISC-roots or pure RISC-designs (back then), you simply ignore DEC's Alpha, MIPS, SUN, IBM's Power... Most of them quite power-hungry and 64bit was known long before Intel or AMD put X86-64 into their designs.

If reduced to ARM I'd say ARM-code is very flexible as is the chipdesign as well. It just depends on the purpose you want to re-design the chip to fulfill your whishes.

Sat, 07/19/2014 - 02:23 | 4976496 walküre