Russian Chipmakers Show Homegrown RISC-V and Arm Chips Running Retro Games at ME26 Forum

Russian chipmakers used retro gaming as a demonstration point for domestically developed processors at the Microelectronics 26 (ME26) forum in Sochi. The exhibition highlighted the country's homegrown chip designs based on Arm, RISC-V, and Elbrus architectures, as geopolitics and sanctions have largely cut off the Russian public from Western hardware, at least officially. A government order issued a couple of years ago to create a high-end gaming console saw relatively little success, and the result of that initiative did not appear to be on display at the event. The report comes from Dmitrii Kuznetsov, a RISC-V and Rust enthusiast who shared photos from the event.

Baikal BE-U1000 Microcontroller

The first units on display use Baikal Electronics' BE-U1000 microcontroller. The chip packs a CPU with three CloudBear cores based on 32-bit RISC-V: two BR-350 cores clocked at 200 MHz and a BM-310 at 100 MHz. Given its microcontroller nature, embedded resources are intentionally sparse, with 256 KB of flash and 192 KB of SRAM, though there is support for external flash. A host of I/O interfaces, including USB 2.0, I2C, I2S, UARTs, and 48 GPIO lines, round out the 10x10 mm QFN-88 package. These parts are aimed at robotics, automation, IoT, sensors, and similar applications.

At the show, a business card-sized controller-and-console built around the BE-U1000 was exhibited alongside an 'Ushka' console styled like the original NES, complete with matching controllers. The game on display appears to be Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.

Elvis Hypercom-U SoC

Next up is the Elvis Hypercom-U, a SoC packing four Arm Cortex-A53 CPU cores at up to 1.2 GHz, dual ELcore-50 DSPs, a PowerVR GE8300 GPU, and dedicated video, image, and navigation processing blocks. The main silicon can be paired with up to 8 GB of LPDDR4 and supports USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth connectivity, plus HDMI output. The product is aimed at multimedia, navigation, single-board computers, and smart cameras. At the forum, a board with the Hypercom-U was shown playing the original Super Mario as a demonstration.

MCST Elbrus-Based PCs

Finally, there were MCST's Elbrus-based PCs, though few details were offered on which machines were on display. Elbrus is a Russian-developed chip architecture often positioned as the basis for high-end desktop and server applications. The report's best guess is that the machines at the forum were based on the leading-edge Elbrus-16S chip with 16 cores at up to 2 GHz and support for up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 RAM. The chip is manufactured on a 16 nm process and comprises 12 billion transistors, and dual-processor server prototypes with up to 2 TB of RAM use this design.

The other chip likely being demoed is the Elbrus-2S3, targeted at mini-PCs and laptops. Previously covered is the Rostec MP21, a Raspberry Pi-like machine with 8 GB of RAM and SSDs up to 480 GB. The 16 nm SoC is clocked at up to 2 GHz and capable of 196 GFLOPS, with support for DDR4-3200 and PCIe 3.0, though power consumption can be fairly high, as the MP21 board can draw around 40 W.

Sources: Tom's Hardware