Russian CPU

[tvbcof]

This is awesome news to me for a variety of reasons.  My interest is mostly associated with security, but some of them simply technical in terms of architecture.

  http://www.techspot.com/news/57199-russia-plans-to-ditch-us-processors-inside-government-pcs-in-favor-of-local-chips.html

I'll certainly try to be one of the first customers and an active tester of secure OS's that might run under the architecture.  Russia is not saying specifically that they don't trust American made chips to be free of back-doors.  Nor have I heard any official statements that the effort is to be sufficiently open-source.  It could be that Russia simply wants their own back-doors.  Even in this case, as an American a Russian exploit is less threatening to me than an NSA one.

I hope that the Russians follow up with (supposedly) secure chipsets and other necessary developments.  Ideally we'll see a complete suite of hardware components that can be audited.  As a consumer I would pay at least double for a device which I could realistically and comprehensively verified to be secure, and probably more.

It is interesting to me that the Chinese have not made more of an issue of this.  A logical hypothesis is that they are at least as interested in and proficient at implementing backdoors as the Americans are.

[bitsmichel]

This is awesome news to me for a variety of reasons.  My interest is mostly associated with security, but some of them simply technical in terms of architecture.

  http://www.techspot.com/news/57199-russia-plans-to-ditch-us-processors-inside-government-pcs-in-favor-of-local-chips.html

I'll certainly try to be one of the first customers and an active tester of secure OS's that might run under the architecture.  Russia is not saying specifically that they don't trust American made chips to be free of back-doors.  Nor have I heard any official statements that the effort is to be sufficiently open-source.  It could be that Russia simply wants their own back-doors.  Even in this case, as an American a Russian exploit is less threatening to me than an NSA one.

I hope that the Russians follow up with (supposedly) secure chipsets and other necessary developments.  Ideally we'll see a complete suite of hardware components that can be audited.  As a consumer I would pay at least double for a device which I could realistically and comprehensively verified to be secure, and probably more.

It is interesting to me that the Chinese have not made more of an issue of this.  A logical hypothesis is that they are at least as interested in and proficient at implementing backdoors as the Americans are.

Not too surprising, Russia wants to expand into other markets. They do not want to depend on other countries for CPU's;
What kind of backdoors are in American CPU's ?

[tvbcof]

Not too surprising, Russia wants to expand into other markets. They do not want to depend on other countries for CPU's;
What kind of backdoors are in American CPU's ?

Unknown...at this time.  Open them for a meaningful audit and we will know, or be able to invalidate the suggestion.  I'm all for letting the free market decide.  The only thing lacking at this point is a choice since no auditable full hardware suite is available (to my knowledge at least.)

I'd be delighted to buy from Intel or AMD if they could eliminate the security concerns that I have.  I hope that ultimately the pressure from the market will outweigh the theoretical disadvantages of open-source in their market segments.  In this case I would probably value an audit from a trusted organization which is demonstrably interested in privacy, technically competent,  and sufficiently uncorruptible as much as open-source.  Intel's and AMD's marketing department does not qualify.

[Littleshop]

This is awesome news to me for a variety of reasons.  My interest is mostly associated with security, but some of them simply technical in terms of architecture.

  http://www.techspot.com/news/57199-russia-plans-to-ditch-us-processors-inside-government-pcs-in-favor-of-local-chips.html

I'll certainly try to be one of the first customers and an active tester of secure OS's that might run under the architecture.  Russia is not saying specifically that they don't trust American made chips to be free of back-doors.  Nor have I heard any official statements that the effort is to be sufficiently open-source.  It could be that Russia simply wants their own back-doors.  Even in this case, as an American a Russian exploit is less threatening to me than an NSA one.

I hope that the Russians follow up with (supposedly) secure chipsets and other necessary developments.  Ideally we'll see a complete suite of hardware components that can be audited.  As a consumer I would pay at least double for a device which I could realistically and comprehensively verified to be secure, and probably more.

It is interesting to me that the Chinese have not made more of an issue of this.  A logical hypothesis is that they are at least as interested in and proficient at implementing backdoors as the Americans are.

Not too surprising, Russia wants to expand into other markets. They do not want to depend on other countries for CPU's;
What kind of backdoors are in American CPU's ?

Great.  A political CPU.  I am sure it will be GREAT!

1) It is NOT a Russian CPU, it is a UK design
2) It is not current desktop class
3) It is not X86

The UK design could have just as many backdoors as any US design. 

If I were trying to ensure Russian computer security I would be much more concerned about software, chipsets and networking components.  It is much harder to put MEANINGFUL backdoors in a CPU then in the items I mentioned.  Unless the chipsets and networking components are MADE IN RUSSIA it is pointless where the CPU is made. 

[tvbcof]

This is awesome news to me for a variety of reasons.  My interest is mostly associated with security, but some of them simply technical in terms of architecture.

  http://www.techspot.com/news/57199-russia-plans-to-ditch-us-processors-inside-government-pcs-in-favor-of-local-chips.html

I'll certainly try to be one of the first customers and an active tester of secure OS's that might run under the architecture.  Russia is not saying specifically that they don't trust American made chips to be free of back-doors.  Nor have I heard any official statements that the effort is to be sufficiently open-source.  It could be that Russia simply wants their own back-doors.  Even in this case, as an American a Russian exploit is less threatening to me than an NSA one.

I hope that the Russians follow up with (supposedly) secure chipsets and other necessary developments.  Ideally we'll see a complete suite of hardware components that can be audited.  As a consumer I would pay at least double for a device which I could realistically and comprehensively verified to be secure, and probably more.

It is interesting to me that the Chinese have not made more of an issue of this.  A logical hypothesis is that they are at least as interested in and proficient at implementing backdoors as the Americans are.

Not too surprising, Russia wants to expand into other markets. They do not want to depend on other countries for CPU's;
What kind of backdoors are in American CPU's ?

Great.  A political CPU.  I am sure it will be GREAT!

1) It is NOT a Russian CPU, it is a UK design
2) It is not current desktop class
3) It is not X86

The UK design could have just as many backdoors as any US design. 

Sounds nice, but unfortunately you don't know what your are talking about.  If you license a core from ARM you have high visibility into the circuitry and firmware.  This differs significantly from buying a packaged unit from Intel or AMD.  You can take solace in the fact that a lot of others share your ignorance.

As for the deviance from x86 architecture and supposed 'class', I don't use an OS that makes it matter excessively.  And in the cases where it does, compiler improvements will happen rapidly with hardware availability.  Of course I'll keep a windows machine kicking around for non-important stuff which requires closed source pre-compiled stuff.  Mostly for viewing porn to say the truth.  Or using Multibit if I end up wanting to do that at some point.

If I were trying to ensure Russian computer security I would be much more concerned about software, chipsets and networking components.  It is much harder to put MEANINGFUL backdoors in a CPU then in the items I mentioned.  Unless the chipsets and networking components are MADE IN RUSSIA it is pointless where the CPU is made. 

That's what I was getting at when I mentioned 'suite'.  You may or may not be aware that almost everything (including a $2 memory chip) has a micro-controller and has the potential to have various kinds of backdoors or exploits hidden within them.  Ultimately I would like to use nothing that is not audited with high precision against such things.

As I mentioned before, I would much rather the Russian intelligence services be able to hack my shit than the U.S. intelligence services.  As an American the U.S. intelligence services are a vastly bigger threat to me.

[Littleshop]

This is awesome news to me for a variety of reasons.  My interest is mostly associated with security, but some of them simply technical in terms of architecture.

  http://www.techspot.com/news/57199-russia-plans-to-ditch-us-processors-inside-government-pcs-in-favor-of-local-chips.html

I'll certainly try to be one of the first customers and an active tester of secure OS's that might run under the architecture.  Russia is not saying specifically that they don't trust American made chips to be free of back-doors.  Nor have I heard any official statements that the effort is to be sufficiently open-source.  It could be that Russia simply wants their own back-doors.  Even in this case, as an American a Russian exploit is less threatening to me than an NSA one.

I hope that the Russians follow up with (supposedly) secure chipsets and other necessary developments.  Ideally we'll see a complete suite of hardware components that can be audited.  As a consumer I would pay at least double for a device which I could realistically and comprehensively verified to be secure, and probably more.

It is interesting to me that the Chinese have not made more of an issue of this.  A logical hypothesis is that they are at least as interested in and proficient at implementing backdoors as the Americans are.

Not too surprising, Russia wants to expand into other markets. They do not want to depend on other countries for CPU's;
What kind of backdoors are in American CPU's ?

Great.  A political CPU.  I am sure it will be GREAT!

1) It is NOT a Russian CPU, it is a UK design
2) It is not current desktop class
3) It is not X86

The UK design could have just as many backdoors as any US design. 

Sounds nice, but unfortunately you don't know what your are talking about.  If you license a core from ARM you have high visibility into the circuitry and firmware.  This differs significantly from buying a packaged unit from Intel or AMD.  You can take solace in the fact that a lot of others share your ignorance.

It is a shame you followed up with a personal attack.  All three of my bullet points are correct. 

CPU's do not have firmware they have microcode.  Purchasing and seeing both the microcode and the circuitry might give you some chance of spotting a backdoor but no guarantee.  Again, the main point of my statement, a CPU is a bad place to put a backdoor in the first place.  This is political posturing. 

Show me a Russian made motherboard with Russian made support chips and you have something, otherwise it is pointless.

[tvbcof]

Great.  A political CPU.  I am sure it will be GREAT!

1) It is NOT a Russian CPU, it is a UK design
2) It is not current desktop class
3) It is not X86

The UK design could have just as many backdoors as any US design. 

Sounds nice, but unfortunately you don't know what your are talking about.  If you license a core from ARM you have high visibility into the circuitry and firmware.  This differs significantly from buying a packaged unit from Intel or AMD.  You can take solace in the fact that a lot of others share your ignorance.

It is a shame you followed up with a personal attack.  All three of my bullet points are correct.

Shame on you for snipping my points about where your points were basically irrelevant to me AND THEN reiterating the appropriateness of your assertions.  And, of course, for trying to make points that don't really make any sense from a technical perspective.

I still don't understand what you are trying to say about 'not the current desktop class'.  The story indicates that they are targeting desktops.  If you are saying that they are not powerful enough, I would say that we don't know enough about that.  The architecture with many cores has the ability to excel in some areas with some OS's and software designs.  It probably never will with Windows-8, but the Russians threw that OS in the trash even before the Chinese did.  Linux and other OS's can be perfectly fine desktops on very limited hardware.  I doubt that a criteria for the Russians is that it is a killer gaming platform and I don't give two shits about that either.

CPU's do not have firmware they have microcode.  Purchasing and seeing both the microcode and the circuitry might give you some chance of spotting a backdoor but no guarantee.  Again, the main point of my statement, a CPU is a bad place to put a backdoor in the first place.  This is political posturing. 

I use firmware and microcode synonymously.  Accd to the story, the Russians are putting enough funding and tasking the right group to do this work that they will almost certainly be licencing access to the micocode, and very likely re-writing it as needed.  I probably should have said microcode since it is not re-writable on a per-unit basis but in this context it doesn't matter much.

Show me a Russian made motherboard with Russian made support chips and you have something, otherwise it is pointless.

All I said is that I hope that we can see this at some point.  I'm sure that your (and my) point about real security demanding an encompassing set of solutions is not lost on the Russians.  I'm less sure that they would supply the rest of the world with what I happen to want for my own personal reasons.

[Balthazar]

MCST already have SPARC and VLIW processors... Such as MCST-R500, MCST-R1000, Elbrus-4C... These processors are used for military purposes.  Why would they need ARM Cortex? It seems pretty strange to me.

[DrG]

Glasnost & Perestroika

Was Putin some sort of boxer previously since he obviously has some mental deficiencies.  Where exactly does he plan on going with this?

It's one thing to want to keep the country secure but to start a whole new industry to spite those Yankee CPUs 

Russia was the home of some of the world's great inventors...was.  The last great thing they put out was BTCe

[tvbcof]

MCST already have SPARC and VLIW processors... Such as MCST-R500, MCST-R1000, Elbrus-4C... These processors are used for military purposes.  Why would they need ARM Cortex? It seems pretty strange to me.

Several reasons I could think of off hand might include:

ARM is an especially active and interesting architecture due to widespread use.  Meaning that a lot of effort is going into compilers for it and porting of more common applications will be along for the ride.  Given that one of the focuses of the product is for desktop use under Linux, this is a significant factor.

Also since ARM is popular it has more resources for basic development.  We see this in the continuing improvements in die size and related efficiency for instance.

They seem to be expecting to employ many cores per chip.  I've long felt that this will be the most likely way forward for a whole range of hardware classes and have been surprised that it's taken as long as it has to come into the fold.  It complicates many things and is sub-optimal for certain kinds of problems,  but eventually it's probably going to end up eclipsing the limited core architectures on a lot of fronts.  Biting the bullet now will very possibly give one a leg-up on their competition in the future.  Of course SPARC, at least, is conducive to doing this as the higher end SUN gear has demonstrated for a long time, but I doubt that that architecture will ever be as competitive as ARM in the lower end power sensitive market segment.

Lastly, if they do actually intend to open-source some of this stuff it would be a complication if they start with a processor which is in widespread use in the military industry.