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.  

It is noteworthy that Delta is by far not the only Russian company to develop a PC based on the Baikal-M1, a processor that is not produced in volumes. Bitblaze, a Russian brand specializing in servers, storage systems, and workstations, demonstrated its pre-production Bitblaze Titan BM15 notebook last August. While the company promised to sell the laptop later in the year, the PC is still listed as ‘in development’ on Bitblaze’s website.