upstart writes:

The sanctions are having a huge impact:

[...] According to China's General Administration of Customs data published Tuesday (via The South China Morning Post), the country imported 67.6 billion integrated circuits (IC) in January and February. That's down 26.5% from the same period last year, and higher than the 15.3% fall recorded for the entirety of 2022.

The total value of these imports also declined, from $68.8 billion last year to $47.8 billion, a drop of 30.5%. That's partly due to chip prices that have fallen due to oversupply and the general economic downturn.

China's IC exports also fell in the first two months, down 20.9% to 37.3 billion units, while the total value of the exports dropped 25.8%.

The US has been tightening its restrictions on China's chip industry over the last 12 months, which the United States says will prevent its global rival from developing semiconductors for military applications, including supercomputers, nuclear weapons modeling, and hypersonic weapons.

October's restrictions on chipmaking tools from the Bureau of Industry and Security were some of the harshest, designed to cap China's logic chips at the 14-nanometre node, DRAM at 18nm, and 3D NAND flash at 128 layers. The US has also prohibited AMD and Nvidia from selling some of its high-performance AI-focused GPUs to China, including team green's A100 GPUs.

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After Nearly a Decade in Development, Japan's New Rocket Fails in Debut

upstart writes:

Japan's science minister said the failure was "extremely regrettable:

The launch of Japan's H3 rocket on Tuesday morning failed after the vehicle's second stage engine did not ignite.

In a terse statement on the failure, Japanese space agency JAXA said, "A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 a.m. (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission. We are confirming the situation."

The Japanese space agency, in concert with the rocket's manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has spent about $1.5 billion developing the H3 rocket over the last decade. Much of the challenge in building the new rocket involved development of a new LE-9 engine, which is fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, to power the first stage. This appeared to perform flawlessly. The second-stage engine that failed, the LE-5B, was a more established engine.

The country has sought to increase its share of the commercial launch market by building a lower-cost alternative to its older H2-A vehicle to more effectively compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Mitsubishi's goal was to sell the H3 at $51 million per launch in its base configuration. This would allow the company to supplement its launches of institutional missions for the Japanese government with commercial satellites. Tuesday's debut flight of the H3 rocket carried the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 for the Japanese government. It was lost.

[...] The failure is just the latest challenge for the H3 rocket. A fundamental problem with the booster is that, even if it were to fly safely, the H3 rocket has no clear advantages over the Falcon 9, which now has a streak of more than 170 consecutive successful launches. The new H3 rocket is also fully expendable, unlike the Falcon 9 and many newer boosters in development in the United States and China.

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upstart writes:

Washington judge issued an arrest warrant and ordered her to involuntary detention:

A judge in Washington issued an arrest warrant Thursday for a Tacoma woman who has refused to have her active, contagious case of tuberculosis treated for over a year, violating numerous court orders. The judge also upheld an earlier order to have her jailed, where she can be  tested and treated in isolation.

On Thursday, the woman attended the 17th court hearing on the matter and once again refused a court order to isolate or comply with testing and treatmentan order that originally dates back to January 19, 2022. Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen rejected her objections to being treated and upheld a finding of contempt. Though it remains unclear what her objections are, the woman's lawyer suggested it may be a problem with understanding, according to The News Tribune. The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, however, argued that she "knowingly, willfully, and contemptuously violated this court's orders," noting the lengthy process and numerous proceedings and discussions in which interpreters, translated documents, and speakers of her native language were made available.

[...] As Ars previously reported, the court had renewed orders for her isolation and treatment on a monthly basis since January of 2022. The health department had always said it was approaching the problem cautiously, working to keep a "balance between restricting somebody's liberty and protecting the health of the community." It sees detention as the "very, very last option."

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upstart writes:

50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World:

[...] I'm talking about the Xerox Alto, which debuted in the early spring of 1973 at the photocopying giant's newly established R&D laboratory, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The reason it is so uncannily familiar today is simple: We are now living in a world of computing that the Alto created.

The Alto was a wild departure from the computers that preceded it. It was built to tuck under a desk, with its monitor, keyboard, and mouse on top. It was totally interactive, responding directly to its single user.

[...] The people who developed the Alto came to Xerox PARC from universities, industrial labs, and commercial ventures, bringing with them diverse experiences and skills. But these engineers and programmers largely shared the same point of view. They conceived and developed the Alto in a remarkable burst of creativity, used it to develop diverse and pathbreaking software, and then moved out of Xerox, taking their achievements, design knowledge, and experiences into the wider world, where they and others built on the foundation they had established.

[...] The type of computing they envisioned was thoroughly interactive and personal, comprehensively networked, and completely graphicalwith high-resolution screens and high-quality print output.

[...] Oddly, at the time, an expensive new laboratory was also immediately financially attractive: R&D expenditures were frequently counted as assets instead of business expenses, all with Wall Street's approval. The more you spent, the better your balance sheet looked.

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upstart writes:

Dutch Officials Warn That Big Telecom's Plan To Tax 'Big Tech' Is A Dangerous Dud:

For much of the last year, European telecom giants have been pushing for a tax on Big Tech company profits. They've tried desperately to dress it up as a reasonable adult policy proposal, but it's effectively just the same thing we saw during the U.S. net neutrality wars: telecom monopolies demanding other people pay them an additional troll toll for no coherent reason.

To sell captured lawmakers on the idea, telecom giants have falsely claimed that Big Tech companies get a "free ride" on the Internet (just as they did during the U.S. net neutrality wars). To fix this problem they completely made up, Big Telecom argues Big Tech should be forced to help pay for the kind of broadband infrastructure upgrades the telecoms have routinely neglected for years.

It's a big, dumb con. But yet again, telecom lobbyists have somehow convinced regulators that this blind cash grab is somehow sensible, adult policy. Dutifully, European Commission's industry chief Thierry Breton (himself a former telecom exec) said last September he would launch a consultation on this "fair share" payment scheme in early 2023, ahead of any proposed legislation.

[...] But they're often not looking at the real problem. Both in the EU and North America, regulators routinely and mindlessly let telecom giants consolidate and monopolize an essential utility. Those monopolies then work tirelessly to drive up rates and crush competition. And, utilizing their lobbying power, they've also routinely gleamed billions in subsidies for networks they routinely half-complete.

[...] If the EU successfully implements such a scheme, you can be absolutely sure the next step will be the U.S., with captured regulators like Brendan Carr (who has been beating this idiotic drum for a few years now) at the front of the parade at Comcast's and AT&T's behest.

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owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/02/8086-modrm-addressing.html

One interesting aspect of a computer's instruction set is its addressing modes, how the computer determines the address for a memory access. The Intel 8086 (1978) used the ModR/M byte, a special byte following the opcode, to select the addressing mode.1 The ModR/M byte has persisted into the modern x86 architecture, so it's interesting to look at its roots and original implementation.

In this post, I look at the hardware and microcode in the 8086 that implements ModR/M2 and how the 8086 designers fit multiple addressing modes into the 8086's limited microcode ROM. One technique was a hybrid approach that combined generic microcode with hardware logic that filled in the details for a particular instruction. A second technique was modular microcode, with subroutines for various parts of the task.

I've been reverse-engineering the 8086 starting with the silicon die. The die photo below shows the chip under a microscope. The metal layer on top of the chip is visible, with the silicon and polysilicon mostly hidden underneath. Around the edges of the die, bond wires connect pads to the chip's 40 external pins. I've labeled the key functional blocks; the ones that are important to this discussion are darker and will be discussed in detail below. Architecturally, the chip is partitioned into a Bus Interface Unit (BIU) at the top and an Execution Unit (EU) below. The BIU handles bus and memory activity as well as instruction prefetching, while the Execution Unit (EU) executes instructions and microcode. Both units play important roles in memory addressing.

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upstart writes:

The corridor is 30 feet long and likely slopes upward. Where it leads is still a mystery.

In 2016, scientists using muon imaging picked up signals indicating a hidden corridor behind the famous chevron blocks on the north face of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The following year, the same team detected a mysterious void in another area of the pyramid, believing it could be a hidden chamber. Two independent teams of researchers, using two different muon imaging methods, have now successfully mapped out the corridor for the first time, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's former antiquities minister, called it "the most important discovery of the 21st century." [So far - Ed]

As we've reported previously, there is a long history of using muons to image archaeological structures, a process made easier because cosmic rays provide a steady supply of these particles. An engineer named E.P. George used them to make measurements of an Australian tunnel in the 1950s. But Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez really put muon imaging on the map when he teamed up with Egyptian archaeologists to use the technique to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza. Although it worked in principle, they didn't find any hidden chambers.

There are many variations of muon imaging, but they all typically involve gas-filled chambers. As muons zip through the gas, they collide with the gas particles and emit a telltale flash of light, which is recorded by the detector, allowing scientists to calculate the particle's energy and trajectory. It's similar to X-ray imaging or ground-penetrating radar, except with naturally occurring high-energy muons rather than X-rays or radio waves. That higher energy makes it possible to image thick, dense substances like the stones used to build pyramids. The denser the imaged object, the more muons are blocked, casting a telltale shadow. Hidden chambers in a pyramid would show up in the final image because they blocked fewer particles.

...

upstart writes:

Huge lithium find may end world shortage there's a catch:

Lithium, sometimes hyped as white gold, has been highly sought after for its role in battery production, and other things.

Global demand is expected to continue to outstrip supply in the years to come. Albemarle Corporation projects [PDF] lithium demand will rise from 1.8 million metric tons in 2025 to 3.7 million metric tons in 2030 largely due to its role in electric vehicles and other battery dependent devices.

The White House last year said critical minerals rare earth metals, lithium, and cobalt "are essential to our national security and economic prosperity."

Alas for the US, the latest cache of this malleable metal has turned up in Iran one of just four countries America has designated a state sponsor of terrorism.

According to The Financial Tribune, an English language news publication focused on Iran that's operated by Tehran-based Donya-e-Eqtesad, Ebrahim Ali Molla-Beigi, director general of the Exploration Affairs Office of the Ministry of Industries, Mining and Trade, said that Iran has discovered its first lithium reserve in Hamedan Province, in the western part of the country.

The reserve is said to be 8.5 million metric tons, which if accurate would be among the largest known deposits yet discovered.

According to the US Geological Survey [PDF], the top five identified lithium reserves are: Bolivia, 21 million tons; Argentina, 20 million tons; Chile, 11 million tons; Australia, 7.9 million tons, and China, 6.8 million tons.

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hubie writes:

Scientists are aiming to revolutionise British diets by slipping more UK-grown beans into our daily bread:

Researchers and chefs at the University of Reading aim to encourage British consumers and food producers to switch to bread containing faba beans (commonly known as broad beans), making it healthier and less damaging to the environment.

[...] Five teams of researchers within the University of Reading, along with members of the public, farmers, industry, and policy makers, are now working together to bring about one of the biggest changes to UK food in generations.

[...] This is by increasing pulses in the UK diet, particularly faba beans, due to their favourable growing conditions in the UK and the sustainable nutritional enhancement they provide.

Despite being an excellent alternative to the ubiquitous imported soya bean, used currently in bread as an improver, the great majority of faba beans grown in the UK go to animal feed at present.

[...] "96% of people in the UK eat bread, and 90% of that is white bread, which in most cases contains soya. We've already performed some experiments and found that faba bean flour can directly replace imported soya flour and some of the wheat flour, which is low in nutrients. We can not only grow the faba beans here, but also produce and test the faba bean-rich bread, with improved nutritional quality."

For those who prefer their information in YouTube format

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upstart writes:

In-hardware security can be defeated with just two extra bytes:

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) secure crypto-processor became a topic for public debate in 2021 when Microsoft forced TPM 2.0 adoption as a minimum requirement for installing Windows 11. The dedicated hardware controller should provide "extra hard" security to data and cryptographic algorithms, but the official specifications are bugged.

Security researchers recently discovered a couple of flaws in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 reference library specification, two dangerous buffer overflow vulnerabilities that could potentially impact billions of devices. Exploiting the flaws is only possible from an authenticated local account, but a piece of malware running on an affected device could do exactly that.

The two vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2023-1017 and CVE-2023-1018, or as "out-of-bounds write" and "out-of-bounds read" flaws. The issue was discovered within the TPM 2.0's Module Library, which allows writing (or reading) two "extra bytes" past the end of a TPM 2.0 command in the CryptParameterDecryption routine.

By writing specifically crafted malicious commands, an attacker could exploit the vulnerabilities to crash the TPM chip making it "unusable," execute arbitrary code within TPM's protected memory or read/access sensitive data stored in the (theoretically) isolated crypto-processor.

In other words, successful exploitation of the CVE-2023-1017 and CVE-2023-1018 flaws could compromise cryptographic keys, passwords and other critical data, making security features of modern, TPM-based operating systems like Windows 11 essentially useless or broken.

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upstart writes:

Arm says it decided a sole US listing in 2023 was "the best path forward":

[...] Arm's decision not to pursue a listing on the London Stock Exchange this year has raised concerns that the UK market is not doing enough to attract tech company stock offerings, with US exchanges seen to offer higher profiles and valuations.

SoftBank Group Corp's founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son said last year he would probably look to the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange for a potential Arm listing.

[...] "Arm is proud of its British heritage, and continues to work with the British Government," he said. "We will continue to invest and play a significant role in the British tech ecosystem."

A Government spokesperson said: "The UK is taking forward ambitious reforms to the rules governing its capital markets, building on our continued success as Europe's leading hub for investment, and the second largest globally."

They added the UK "continues to attract some of the most innovative and largest companies in the world" and acknowledged Arm's commitment to its UK presence with more jobs and investment.

[...] Russ Shaw CBE, founder of Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates, said Arm's statement offered "glimpses of hope" for its commitment to its British roots, but Arm and SoftBank's decision to opt for a sole US listing is "a significant blow to the UK tech sector".

[...] He added Arm's decision "must be upheld as a case study for the UK Government of how 'not to do it'" - citing the company's sale to SoftBank in 2016 as a factor determining its US-only listing.

"Nations like the US and China that recognise the strategic value of chip companies would not have allowed such decisions to be made - then or now - and the UK must now endeavour to proactively protect its semiconductor industry," said Mr Shaw.

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upstart writes:

The Foss community is giving yet another try with an app store for all Linux OSes:

Some influential people in the open-source community are pushing for the adoption of a one-stop app store for Linux-based operating systems. The store would be built on Flatpak, a popular software deployment and package management utility, and it could provide customers with the same user-friendly approach other popular app stores in the consumer market are known for.

[...] The proposal's main goal is to "promote diversity and sustainability" in the Linux desktop community by "adding payments, donations and subscriptions" to the Flathub app store. Flathub is the standard app repository for Flatpak, a project described as a "vendor-neutral service" for Linux application development and deployment.

[...] The universal app store proponents say that "a healthy application ecosystem is essential for the success of the OSS desktop," so that end-users can "trust and control" their data and development platforms on the device they are using. Flathub has been jointly built by the GNOME foundation and KDE, and it isn't the only app store available in the Linux world.

Alternative solutions like Canonical's Snaps, however, are sitting under the control of a single corporation and aren't designed as a universal Linux app store from the get-go. Canonical has recently decided that neither Ubuntu, nor the other Ubuntu-based distros (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.), will give their official support to Flatpak. Users can manually add the tool after installing the operating system, though.

Besides providing a universal app store for the entire Linux world, Flatpak supporters also want to "incentivize participation in the Linux application ecosystem," and remove financial barriers that prevent diverse participation. For this reason, the proponents are planning to add a new way to send donations and payments via Stripe within this year.

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NASA: DART Mission Proves Kinetic Impact Can Save Earth From Incoming Asteroids

upstart writes:

NASA's DART mission was a smashing success:

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test ended last year with the spacecraft colliding with an asteroid known as Dimorphos. NASA announced in the following weeks that DART had altered the asteroid's trajectory, and now we have four peer-reviewed papers that explore just how successful the mission was. The news is good NASA has confirmed that DART validates kinetic impact as a viable way to deflect dangerous asteroids.

[...] Scientists are working to reconstruct the impact to evaluate DART's autonomous targeting ability. The authors of this study concluded that a DART-like mission to redirect a dangerous asteroid could theoretically do so without an advanced reconnaissance flight. [...]

Another of the four studies confirmed via two different measurement techniques that Dimorphos' orbit shifted by 33 minutes. NASA had expected the impact to push the asteroid by at least seven minutes, but the recoil effect of ejecta blasted off the surface had a greater effect than predicted. [...]

A separate study looked at the momentum transfer from the impact. The researchers found that DART instantly altered Dimorphos' orbit, slowing it by 2.7 millimeters per second. [...] The final study discusses what we can learn from DART beyond the planetary defense angle. Dimorphos it's now an "active asteroid" surrounded by a cloud of dust. The authors say analysis of this comet-like tail could help us learn more about the natural processes at work on asteroids.

Luckily, there are no known asteroid threats for at least the next century, but our catalog of near-Earth objects is incomplete. We could discover an asteroid with a high chance of impact tomorrow. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. For decades, kinetic redirection was seen as a potential way to save Earth from those rare but inevitable events, but no one knew if it would work. Now we do humanity has the tools to prevent at least one kind of doomsday.

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upstart writes:

Dish Network Finally Acknowledges Huge Hack After Days Of Not Answering Questions:

Early this week reports began to emerge that Dish Network was suffering from a widespread outage that effectively prevented a large chunk of the company's employees from being able to work for more than four days. Initially, Dish tried to downplay the scope of the problem in press reports, only stating that they'd experienced an ambiguous "systems issue."

Five days in and it was finally revealed that the company had been hacked, subjected to a ransomware attack, and subscriber data had been compromised. But, of course, customers didn't find out from Dish, they only learned about it via leaked internal communications:

Dish has told employees that it's "investigating a cybersecurity incident" and that it's "aware that certain data was extracted" from its IT systems as a result of this incident, according to an internal email sent by CEO Erik Carlson and obtained by The Verge. This comes on the fifth day of an internal outage that's taken down some of the company's internal networks, customer support systems, and websites such as boostinfinite.com and dish.com.

Employees have been completely locked out of their systems, telling Bleeping Computer that they're seeing blank screen icons common during ransomware attacks. As of this writing, things are so bad at Dish that their primary website is a placeholder page, though at least they finally got around to confirming things in an ambiguous statement.

You might recall that Dish Network was part of a doomed Trump-era plan to justify the T-Mobile Sprint merger by encouraging Dish to build its own 5G network. That plan isn't going so well either, and similar to T-Mobile's comical inability to secure its network, you have to wonder how much merger logistics distracted the...

fliptop writes:

Europe's original plan to bring AI under control is no match for the technology's new, shiny chatbot application:

Artificial intelligence's newest sensation the gabby chatbot-on-steroids ChatGPT is sending European rulemakers back to the drawing board on how to regulate AI.

[...] The technology has already upended work done by the European Commission, European Parliament and EU Council on the bloc's draft artificial intelligence rulebook, the Artificial Intelligence Act. The regulation, proposed by the Commission in 2021, was designed to ban some AI applications like social scoring, manipulation and some instances of facial recognition. It would also designate some specific uses of AI as "high-risk," binding developers to stricter requirements of transparency, safety and human oversight.

[...] These AIs "are like engines. They are very powerful engines and algorithms that can do quite a number of things and which themselves are not yet allocated to a purpose," said Drago Tudorache, a Liberal Romanian lawmaker who, together with S&D Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei, is tasked with shepherding the AI Act through the European Parliament.

Already, the tech has prompted EU institutions to rewrite their draft plans. The EU Council, which represents national capitals, entrust the Commission with establishing cybersecurity, transparency and risk-management requirements for general-purpose AIs.

[...] Professionals in sectors like education, employment, banking and law enforcement have to be aware "of what it entails to use this kind of system for purposes that have a significant risk for the fundamental rights of individuals," Benifei said.

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upstart writes:

Air Force has already successfully tested and approved the sustainable aviation fuel:

As more companies focus on lowering their own carbon emissions, one startup is looking to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and create sustainable aviation fuel. It already has a small-scale working process and says that if it and other manufacturers scale up production, it could "mitigate" at least 10 percent of carbon emissions.

A startup specializing in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) signed a $65 million contract with the US Department of Defense to create jet fuel out of thin air. The contract will provide a startup called Air Company funds to advance research and development of a system that can extract CO2 from the air and convert it into fuel-grade alcohols and paraffin.

Air Company already has a process of converting CO2 to jet fuel and published a white paper on the procedure. The company claims to have eliminated a step in the nearly 100-year-old Fischer-Tropsch process. It involves creating, harvesting, and storing CO2 from industrial corn fermentation. It then uses water electrolysis to produce hydrogen gas (H2) and oxygen (O2).

The O2 is released into the atmosphere, and the H2 feeds into a reactor with the captured CO2 and a catalyst. The chemical reaction produces ethanol, methanol, water, and paraffin. Distillation separates these components for use in other products, including vodka, perfume, hand sanitizer, and SAF.

The company cannot yet produce at the scale needed to impact global CO2 levels. However, CEO Gregory Constantine says that if Air Company and others can build to scale and all fuel-dependant industries switch to SAF, it could mitigate over 10 percent of carbon emissions.

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hubie writes:

A physicist's task is to constantly create equations that keep up with our observations of physical phenomena:

Researching a cosmic mystery like dark matter has its downsides. On the one hand, it's exciting to be on the road to what might be a profound scientific discovery. On the other hand, it's hard to convince people it's worth studying something that's invisible, untouchable, and apparently made of something entirely unknown.

While the vast majority of physicists find the evidence for dark matter's existence convincing, some continue to examine alternatives, and the views in the press and the public are significantly more divided. The most common response I get when I talk about dark matter is: "isn't this just something physicists made up to make the math work out?"

The answer to that might surprise you: yes! In fact, everything in physics is made up to make the math work out.

[...] This level of abstraction is especially apparent in particle physics, because the existence or non-existence of a single particle on a subatomic scale is a rather fuzzy notion. The equations describing the motion of an electron through space don't actually include a particle at all, but rather an abstract mathematical object called a wavefunction that can spread out and interfere with itself.

Is it ever true, then, to say that an electron is 'real' when it's in motion? If we believe that electrons are real things, have we just made up the wavefunction to make the math work out? Absolutely that was, in fact, the whole point. We couldn't get the equations to work if the electron was a solid, isolated particle, so we made up something that wasn't, and then the numbers started making sense.

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upstart writes:

Russian Nuclear Company Tests 'Beaver' PCs With Homegrown Baikal CPUs:

A daughter company of Rosatom, a nuclear energy company owned by the Russian government, is testing PCs from Delta Computers called Beaver that are based on a processor designed by Russia's Baikal Microelectronics and a Linux distribution approved for use by state agencies. The company is trying to replace PCs designed by Western companies with something domestic, reports 3DNews. But they may have an obstacle in their way.

Delta Computers' Beaver is a small form-factor PC running Baikal Electronics's Baikal-M1 (BE-M1000) chip and the Astra Linux Special Edition operating system. The Beaver can have up to 64GB of DDR4 memory and up to 16TB of HDD and SSD storage. The machine has multiple USB Type-A 2.0/3.0 ports, PS/2 connectors, an RS-232 header, two Ethernet ports, an HDMI output, and two 3.5-mm audio connectors for headphones and microphones. The PC can be upgraded with low-profile PCIe 3.0 x8 add-in-boards, such as graphics cards. The system uses an LCD display, a corded keyboard, and a corded mouse.

"The concern has purchased the first batch of 'Beaver' domestic personal computers based on the Baikal processor and is getting ready to introduce them into the infrastructure of the Rosenergoatom energy generating company," a statement by Rosatom reads.

Delta's Beaver is nothing special if not for its Baikal-M1 SoC. The Baikal-M1 is a rather well-known processor that packs eight Arm Cortex-A57 cores with an 8MB L3 cache operating at 1.50 GHz and mated with an eight-cluster Arm Mali-T628 GPU with two display pipelines. The SoC, which uses technologies from 2014 2015, is made by TSMC using one of its 28nm-class process technologies. But such processors cannot be shipped to a Russian or a Belarussian entity from Taiwan due to restrictions imposed by the government.

While Rosatom might have procured samples of Beaver (Bober in Russian), Delta Computers can't get enough processors as the owner of Baikal Microelectronics went bankrupt in late 2022.

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