11-Month Old Russian Outfit Claims It Has Developed 16-Core and 32-Core Processors, Flaunts Cyrillic
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Chinese Loongson 3C6000 CPUs now have heat spreaders with words in Cyrillic?
The specifications of Tramplin's 16-core Irtysh C616 (2.20 GHz, 32MB L3, quad-channel DDR4-3200 memory, 844.8 GFLOPS, 100W - 120W TDP) and 32-core Irtysh C632 processors (2.10 GHz, 64MB L3, octa-channel DDR4-3200 memory, 1612.8 GFLOPS, 180W - 200W TDP) are identical to those of Loongson's 16-core LS3C6000/S and 32-core LS3C6000/D CPUs down to a single number, which isn't something that happens usually unless we are dealing with the very same silicon.
Indeed, Tramplin Electronics was first registered on April 4, 2025, so the company is less than a year old. It is impossible to develop a processor from scratch (even based on a known/licensed ISA), find a production partner, build its physical design, tape it out, and get samples in this short of a time frame. In fact, a year is barely enough to bring up a new CPU based on an existing platform (this may easily take a couple of years for a company of AMD's or Intel's size), not to mention developing one from scratch. That said, even though the processors were made in the third week of 2026, it looks like these are regular Loongson LS3C6000 CPUs that carry Cyrillic inscriptions.
Now that Russia-based entities cannot legally obtain high-performance CPUs from companies like AMD or Intel, the only way for the country to retain access to more or less contemporary processors is to buy them illegally in nearby countries, or get Chinese processors from the People's Republic. Apparently, we are dealing with the second option here, albeit with an attempt to disguise Chinese processors as those developed in Russia. Interestingly, the source of the river Irtysh - after which the CPUs are named - is in China.
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