Russian chipmakers demo homegrown RISC-V and Arm chips with retro games

Geopolitics and sanctions have mostly cut off the Russian public from Western hardware — at least officially. In recent ages, the country's homegrown chip designs are Arm, RISC-V, and Elbrus architectures. A handful of interesting designs were on display at the Microelectronics 26 (ME26) forum in Sochi, using retro gaming as a demonstration point. A couple of years back, the government even issued an order to create a high-end gaming console, albeit with relatively little success. The result of that initiative didn't appear to be on display at the event.

The report comes from Dmitrii Kuznetsov, a RISC-V and Rust enthusiast who displayed photos from the event. The first units on display use Baikal Electronics' BE-U1000 microcontroller. According to our digging, the chip packs a CPU with three CloudBear cores (32-bit RISC-V) — two BR-350s clocked at 200 MHz, along with a BM-310 at 100 MHz.

Given the microcontroller nature, embedded resources are intentionally sparse, with 256 KB of flash …