Russia’s heavy blow from Taiwan, China’s great enemy

Taiwanese authorities have announced a list of high-tech equipment that their companies are no longer allowed to sell to Russia and Belarus. However, it seems that the embargo on processors and microcontrollers is not complete, but the two countries will have access only to very low power chips, which are practically useless for the development of computers, smartphones or high-precision or high-performance equipment. in 2022.

Taiwan imposes strict rules on technology exports to Russia

According to the Taiwanese Ministry of Economy, products that cannot be sold to companies in Russia and Belarus or to their state agencies fall into categories 3 to 9 of the Wassenaar Agreement. They cover all kinds of electronic devices and components, from computers and sensors to lasers, navigation equipment, aircraft engines and telecommunications equipment.

There are a few exceptions for products that can still be sold to Russia. Certain processors from very old generations, with low performance. Thus, if Russia wants to buy such processors, they will be in the following specifications: they have a maximum processing power of 5 GFLOPS, with a frequency of 25 MHz or less, use 32-bit instructions and offer a maximum transfer rate of 2 .5 MB / s. Also, these chips cannot have more than 144 pins and no latency less than 0.4ns.

Russia has begun to buy processors of Chinese origin, but they are not produced in very large volumes to meet demand. Production in Russia is also limited, as the technologies available in the country are very outdated. MCST, a Russian-based processor company, is trying to set up another local processor, Mikron, a local processor. MCST previously manufactured 16nm processors on TSMC production lines, but the most advanced Russian node in Mikron factories is 90nm.

In comparison, 90nm was the manufacturing process of AMD Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 processors, launched in 2004. Today’s processors for computers and smartphones are built on modern manufacturing processes, 4, 5, 7 or 10nm, with much smaller transistors and low power consumption. The small size allows the integration of more transistors in a smaller space, which ensures higher performance. Thus, Russian 90nm processors will not be able to compete in terms of performance with modern solutions.

source: Tom’s Hardware