Compared with Intel and Huawei, how is the performance of Russia's most powerful CPU?

Russian processor developer Baikal Electronics wants to show the world that its chips can compete with Intel and Huawei, the best CPUs on the market. In a series of benchmark tests conducted by the company and shared with Russian news outlet Cnews, the fabless semiconductor vendor compared its Baikal-S server processor to Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 and Huawei's Kunpeng 920. The Russian chip's performance isn't that great, but it's not terrible either. While the chip lags far behind Huawei processors, it beat Intel's outdated offerings in some tests.

Baikal-S features 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores on a 16nm process node with a 2GHz base clock and a 2.5GHz boost clock. The Kunpeng 920 (specifically the 920-4826 model), has 48 Armv8 cores at 2.6 clock speeds. Compared to the Kunpeng 920's newer 7nm TSMC HPC manufacturing process, Baikal's processor uses the 16nm TSMC process node.

Launched in 2019, the Intel Xeon Gold 6230 CPU is a bit dated and not necessarily a fair competitor to the Baikal-S. It has just 20 cores (40 threads), with base and boost clock speeds of up to 2.1 GHz and 3.9 GHz respectively. This is an upgrade from Baikal Electronics' previous comparison, which used an older 20-core Xeon Gold 6148 (Skylake).

If Baikal wanted a fairer comparison with Intel's server chips, the company would benchmark one of Intel's Xeon Platinum products, many of which have 48 or more cores.

For some strange reason, the Russian vendor omitted AMD chips from the latest comparison. This is a surprising move, as Baikal Electronics had claimed that the Baikal-S was comparable to the Zen 1-era 16-core EPYC 7351.

Unfortunately, when sharing its benchmarks, Baikal Electronics did not disclose the specifications of the test system or the conditions of the test environment. Therefore, please take these results with a grain of salt.

Although there were only three processors to test, Baikal Electronics did not run all benchmarks on every processor. Whether the company tried to cherry-pick the results to help the Baikal-S stand out is uncertain. The challenging part for us in evaluating these results is combing through them all and finding the most relevant comparison metrics, since some data for specific benchmarks are missing.

Granted, CoreMark is far from a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating processors. Despite this, the Kunpeng 920 is 13% faster than the Baikal-S in the CoreMark single-thread test. Kunpeng 920 is also 23% ahead of Baikal-S in the multi-thread test. Meanwhile, the Baikal-S outperformed the Xeon Gold 6230 by 43% on the same benchmark.

The Stream benchmark helps measure sustainable memory bandwidth. While we know the number of memory channels each processor supports, we don't know the speed or capacity of the DIMMs Baikal Electronics used for testing. The results show that in the Stream benchmark test, Baikal-S has 34% higher bandwidth than the Xeon Gold 6230. However, the Russian chip was surpassed by the Kunpeng 920, which scored 33% higher.

Many people will be familiar with the Linpack benchmark as it is the default test used to rank the TOP500 list of supercomputers. In the case of Baikal Electronics, the supplier used Linpack version 2.3.

The Xeon Gold 6230 is the best performing chip in Linpack, beating the Baikal-S and Kunpeng 920 by 140% and 160% respectively. Baikal-S narrowly beats Kunpeng 920, leading Chinese chips by 8%.

Baikal Electronics also shared some SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark results for the Baikal-S running at 2 GHz and 2.5 GHz. The company didn't compare Baikal-S to the Xeon Gold 6230 or Kunpeng 920.

In terms of 7-Zip compression workload, Kunpeng 920 is 73% faster than Baikal-S. The company didn't benchmark the Xeon Gold 6230's performance in this metric. Baikal-S, on the other hand, beat the Xeon Gold 6230 by 67% in the 7-Zip decompression workload. However, Baikal-S cannot match the Kunpeng 920, which leads the Russian processor by as much as 78%.

Geekbench 5 is a benchmark that many of us can relate to. Although it's not the best test for comparing processors, it's a more mainstream benchmark. Baikal Electronics did not benchmark the Kunpeng 920. As expected, the Xeon Gold 6230's single-core performance is 112% higher than that of the Baikal-S. However, the Russian chip's multi-core score was 80 percent higher than the Xeon Gold 6230's, which isn't surprising considering the Intel processor has less than half the core count of the Xeon Gold 6230.

Baikal Electronics' products are far from competitive with Intel, AMD or even Huawei, and the company's performance proves this. However, the company is optimistic that Baikal-S can reach the same level, given the multi-socket support. A dual-slot configuration is reportedly ready, while the company is working on a quad-socket design.

According to representatives, the company has begun work on Baikal-S2, a next-generation 6nm chip with 28 Arm Neoverse-N2 cores clocked at 3 GHz and supporting up to 8 channels of DDR5 memory. Baikal Electronics is expected to release Baikal-S2 between the second and third quarters of 2025, which is said to improve performance by up to 6 times that of Baikal-S.