Russian Baikal-S CPU Benchmarked Against Old Intel & Huawei Offerings, Gets Humiliated

Russian CPU manufacturer Baikal previously unveiled Baikal-S server CPU, which was hyped up by local media as a challenger to Intel and AMD. However, benchmarks of the CPU have now surfaced, over at the Russian news outlet, CNews, showing a completely different picture.

For a quick recap, the Russian Baikal-S processor offers 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores and is fabricated using 16nm technology. The base frequency of the Baikal BE-S1000 CPU is rated at 2.0 GHz with a max boost of 2.5 GHz and power consumption of 120W. This unique SoC supports four-way parallelism and has an integrated proprietary RISC-V architecture coprocessor to manage data and offer a secure boot. Six 72-bit memory interfaces can support 768 GB of memory, with 128 GB in each channel.

The Russian Baikal-S CPU was put to the test against two somewhat odd options, Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 and Huawei's Kunpeng 920. The competition looks one-sided for Baikal on paper since the Intel CPU features 20 cores. However, in benchmarks, the situation is entirely different since the Xeon Gold 6230 is catching the levels of Baikal-S, beating it in some scenarios.

All three processors were tested in different scenarios; however, the source doesn't disclose other components in the test bench. Hence you could expect inaccuracies. The company's benchmarks didn't include performance figures in some situations to portray the competitiveness of the Baikal BE-S1000.

CoreMark & Stream are synthetic benchmark applications that help evaluate a CPU's performance through various testing. Stream focuses on memory bandwidth; hence the above figures are in "GB/s." The CoreMark results show that the Kunpeng 920 is ahead, beating the Baikal-S by almost 23%. However, the Baikal-S surpasses Intel Xeon Gold 6230 with a massive 43% performance gap.

The CPUs were also tested at Linpack, a famous benchmark for server High-Performance CPUs which often determines the ranking of supercomputers in the Top500 list. Linpack shows an entirely different scenario, with Intel Xeon Gold 6230 beating others considerably in multi-threading performance despite featuring lower cores.

The company also showcased figures from Geekbench 5 and 7-Zip compression, but we believe the figures shared were biased to overshadow Intel's performance. Through these results, we can determine that the offering from Baikal-S is nowhere near offerings from Intel or AMD. In fact, Baikal-S is by huge miles far from competing with any current-gen CPU.

Moreover, the missing data in benchmarks raises questions about the company's credibility. We can't rely on the current data; only the performance can be evaluated if a reputable source reviews the processor.

News Source: CNews