Homegrown Processors at ME26
Geopolitics and sanctions have largely cut off the Russian public from Western hardware. In response, homegrown chip designs utilizing Arm, RISC-V, and Elbrus architectures have emerged. A handful of interesting designs were on display at the Microelectronics 26 forum in Sochi, using retro gaming as a demonstration point. A couple of years back, the government issued an order to create a high-end gaming console, though the result of that initiative did not appear to be on display.
На выставке МЭ26 в Сочи показывали сразу несколько игровых применений русских процессоров Байкал: консоль и визитка на Ушке BE-U1000 Элвис: полноценная приставка на Гиперком У (бывш. СКИФ) МЦСТ: «игровые» ПК на Эльбрусах Не серьёзно, но занимательно #riscv #innoru #pureru https://t.co/QGlRTMnvLROctober 11, 2026
The report comes from RISC-V and Rust enthusiast Dmitrii Kuznetsov, who shared photos from the event. The first units on display utilized Baikal Electronics' BE-U1000 microcontroller. The chip packs a CPU with three CloudBear 32-bit RISC-V cores—two BR-350s clocked at 200 MHz, along with a BM-310 at 100 MHz.
RISC-V Microcontrollers and Arm SoCs
Given its microcontroller nature, embedded resources are sparse, featuring 256 KB of flash and 192 KB of SRAM, alongside support for external flash. A host of I/O interfaces, including USB 2.0, I2C, I2S, UARTs, and 48 GPIO lines, round out the 10x10 mm QFN-88 package. These parts are aimed at robotics, automation, IoT, and sensor applications.
Exhibits included a business card-sized controller-and-console featuring the BE-U1000 chip, as well as an "Ushka" console styled like the original NES with matching controllers. The system was shown running Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
Another highlight was the Elvis Hypercom-U, a system-on-chip packing four Arm Cortex-A53 CPU cores at up to 1.2 GHz, dual ELcore-50 DSPs, a PowerVR GE8300 GPU, and dedicated video, image, and navigation processing blocks. The main silicon can be paired with up to 8 GB of LPDDR4 memory and supports USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth connectivity, and HDMI output.
This product is targeted at multimedia, navigation, single-board computers, and smart cameras. At the exhibition, a board equipped with the Hypercom-U was demonstrated running the original Super Mario game.
Elbrus Architecture PCs
Finally, the showcase featured MCST's Elbrus-based personal computers. Elbrus is a domestically developed VLIW chip architecture utilized as the basis for high-end desktop and server applications.
The machines at the forum likely relied on the Elbrus-16S chip, which features 16 cores operating at up to 2 GHz and supports up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 memory. Manufactured on a 16 nm process, the chip comprises 12 billion transistors, with dual-processor server prototypes supporting up to 2TB of RAM.
Another candidate on display was the Elbrus-2S3, a SoC targeted at mini-PCs and laptops. Previous hardware implementations like the Rostec MP21 feature 8GB of RAM and SSD storage up to 480GB. The 16 nm SoC runs at up to 2 GHz and delivers 196 GFLOPS with support for DDR4-3200 and PCIe 3.0, though power consumption reaches approximately 40W under load.
