Apart from China, Russia is also seen as another country that is subject to economic sanctions because of the ongoing war with Ukraine. Among the restrictions placed on it include foreign companies not being allowed to buy and sell with the country's business entities.
Recently, one of the Russian technology companies, BitBlaze announced that they have built a pre-production laptop called BitBlaze Titan BM15, which is an office productivity laptop that uses a Russian-made processing chip component called Baikal-M.
For now, the specifications known about this laptop include the use of a 15.6-inch screen display, the use of a Baikal-M1 processing chip, the use of 16GB of DDR4 memory and the use of M.2 SSD storage with storage options ranging from 256GB to 512GB.
In terms of plug options, it is seen to have four USB A plugs, one USB plug that uses USB 3.0 technology, one HDMI plug and one 3.5mm audio plug. It is also seen to come with support for WiFi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity.
What is a mystery is the use of this Balkan-M processing chip. It is developed using an ARM Cortex A57 chip core which is quite obsolete with a speed of only around 1.5GHz. Where modern processing chips are now seen using a 5nm or 7nm process to be developed, this Balkan-M1 chip was developed by TSMC using their 28nm process.
Another question mark is how BitBlaze plans to develop these chips since Russia can no longer work with TSMC to develop more of these processing chips.