280 million yuan in subsidies returned! A Russian supercomputer company's self-developed CPU failed to meet the standards and was sued by the Ministry of Industry and Trade

王达业

280 million yuan in subsidies returned! A Russian supercomputer company's self-developed CPU failed to meet the standards and was sued by the Ministry of Industry and Trade [Copy link]

Source: AI Frontline WeChat Official Account

Russian supercomputer company T-Platforms has its subsidies reclaimed by the Ministry of Industry and Trade

According to foreign media CNews, the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade has recently received a court ruling to recover 3.26 billion rubles (about 280 million yuan) from T-Platforms. Among them, 2.76 billion rubles came from the subsidies provided by the Ministry of Industry and Trade to T-Platforms five years ago, and the other 500 million rubles were fines.

According to Wikipedia, T-Platforms is a supercomputer company founded in 2002 and headquartered in Moscow, Russia. T-Platforms has implemented more than 300 integration projects, 6 of which are included in the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

T-Platforms also holds several patents for supercomputer technology and electronic components, and its solutions are used for basic and applied research in a variety of scientific fields, including life sciences, physics, chemistry and mathematics, as well as computationally intensive tasks in engineering, computer graphics and many other disciplines.

In November 2011, T-Platforms built the supercomputer Lomonosov, and ranked third in the 2011 Graph500 list of the world's top 500 supercomputers with its super computing performance. In April 2013, the U.S. Department of Commerce listed T-Platforms on the "Entity List" for violating U.S. national security or foreign policy interests, preventing the company from purchasing computer chips produced anywhere in the world using U.S. technology. From the end of 2013 to the beginning of 2014, T-Platforms was removed from the list by the U.S. Department of Commerce. In 2019, T-Platforms founder Vsevolod Opanasenko was arrested for abuse of power and faces 10 years in prison.

Data shows that since 2016, the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade has provided high subsidies to T-Platforms to support its self-developed processors and computers.

Data shows that the Ministry of Industry and Trade provided T-Platforms with subsidies of 3.07 billion rubles (about 260 million yuan) in 2016. The subsidies for some projects accounted for half of the total project cost and involved multiple product lines including workstations, notebooks, blade servers, rack servers and even switches:

• "A family of servers in the form of blades for high-performance computing and data centers based on x86 processors and domestic processors of the Baikal family" - 437 million rubles of subsidies, the total project cost is 1.3 billion rubles

• "Workstation line based on x86 processors and domestic processors of the Baikal family" - subsidy 644 million rubles, total project cost 1.81 billion rubles

• "A family of workstations in a 'laptop' form factor based on securely designed x86 processors and domestic processors" - 450 million rubles of subsidies, the total project cost is 1.1 billion rubles

• "A series of rack servers based on x86 processors and domestic processors of the Baikal family" - subsidy 660 million rubles, total project cost 1.54 billion rubles

• "A series of laptops based on domestic processors from the Baikal family" - 480 million rubles subsidy, total project cost 1 billion rubles

• "L2/L3 hybrid switch line supporting SDN technology based on domestic Baikal family processors" - subsidy of 403 million rubles, total project cost of 1.03 billion rubles

It is reported that the projects subsidized by the Ministry of Industry and Trade were to be implemented by November 30, 2019 at the latest, but the actual progress was not ideal. On October 5, 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Trade filed a lawsuit in court.

According to documents released by the court, T-Platforms managed to file a counterclaim against the Ministry of Industry and Trade during the litigation, CNews reported. However, a company representative of T-Platforms did not comment to CNews for more information.

Self-developed CPU is "outdated"

According to foreign media reports, the CPU processor previously developed by Baikal Electronics, a subsidiary of T-Platforms, was not very powerful.

Since Russia does not have advanced chip production capabilities, the Baikal-M series processors previously developed by T-Platforms use TSMC foundry, 28nm process, 8-core Cortex-A57 architecture, maximum frequency of 1.5GHz, the entire Mali-T628 MP8 GPU core, frequency of 750MHz, and support for dual-channel DDR4-2400 or DDR3-1600 memory, with power consumption not exceeding 35W.

According to foreign media reports, since the processors were developed a few years ago, the Baikal-M series processors do not look very advanced now, including the architecture and process technology, which are already outdated. However, for Russian companies, the chip from research and development to mass production and delivery is still an important milestone.

Due to TSMC's tight production capacity, the orders for Baikal-M series processors were not large, and the delivery time was delayed by 4 months. In October this year, Baikal-M series processors began to arrive, with only 5,000 pieces in the first batch.

However, Baikal Electronics said that starting from the first quarter of 2022, the company expects to deliver more than 10,000 to 15,000 chips per month. However, the company has not announced a specific customer list at this stage.

Many countries provide subsidies to the semiconductor industry

In fact, not only Russia, but also many countries including China and the United States have provided substantial subsidies to the semiconductor industry.

Data shows that in recent years, domestic subsidies for the semiconductor industry have been increasing significantly. According to statistics, the total amount of subsidies provided by the state to 113 semiconductor companies is 10.6 billion yuan, a 12-fold increase from 10 years ago.

In 2020, China's largest chip foundry, SMIC, received nearly 2.5 billion yuan in subsidies, and its subsidiaries also received $2.25 billion in financing from two government funds. In addition, subsidies for semiconductor equipment manufacturers such as North Huachuang Group and Advanced Micro-Semiconductor Equipment are also increasing.

The United States is also generous in subsidizing the semiconductor industry. On March 31 this year, Biden proposed that Congress allocate $50 billion to subsidize the manufacturing and chip research and development of the U.S. semiconductor industry. According to Reuters on May 11, the world's largest chip buyers, including Apple, Microsoft and Google, are establishing a new lobbying group with chip giants such as Intel to demand that the U.S. government provide chip manufacturing subsidies.

In June this year, the US Senate passed the CHIPS Act, hoping to support domestic chip production in the United States by providing US$52 billion (approximately RMB 331.4 billion) in subsidies to the semiconductor industry, reversing the trend that most chip manufacturing capacity has moved to Taiwan, South Korea and other parts of Asia.

The bill has stalled in the House of Representatives, and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo recently said that the bill may be delayed until 2022. Once the bill is passed, the next step is reportedly the Ministry of Commerce will take the lead in deciding how to allocate the money.

According to reports from South Korean media, South Korea will prepare a budget of 1.5 trillion won (about 8 billion yuan) to support the research and development of next-generation power semiconductors and artificial intelligence chips. In addition, South Korea will provide 1 trillion won (about 5.35 billion yuan) in low-interest loans to support local chip manufacturers' investment in factories, including investment in 8-inch wafer production lines.

Although many countries intend to provide substantial subsidies to the semiconductor industry, since last year, due to factors such as the epidemic and trade frictions, the global semiconductor industry has encountered a chip shortage crisis, affecting multiple industries such as automobiles and consumer electronics. "Chip shortage" is a long-term problem.

If the same thing were done in China, which semiconductor company do you think should return the subsidies?

led2015

The more you gain, the more you should give. But nowadays, people only think about gaining, not giving.