Taiwan announces restrictions on semiconductor exports to Russia, allowing only semiconductors with lower performance than PlayStation 2 CPUs to be exported

Countries and companies around the world are imposing sanctions such as export suspension and sales suspension on Russia, which continues to invade Ukraine. Newly, Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs has announced restrictions on semiconductor exports from Taiwan-based companies to Russia and Belarus. Due to this restriction, semiconductors that can be exported from Taiwan to Russia are required to have lower performance than the CPU installed in the PlayStation 2 (PS2) that appeared in 2000.

Taiwan restricts exports of strategic high-tech commodities to Russia and Belarus
https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20220530PD204.html

Taiwan Restricts Russia, Belarus to CPUs Under 25 MHz Frequency | Tom's Hardware
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/taiwan-restricts-exports-of-25mhz-cpus-to-russia

Since Russia started its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, major semiconductor companies such as Intel and AMD have declared that they will suspend transactions with Russia one after another, making it the world's largest semiconductor producer based in Taiwan. A TSMC has also announced that it will participate in sanctions on Russia in February 2022. Furthermore, in March 2022, the Japanese government announced a semiconductor export ban on Russia and Belarus, and many governments and companies have restricted semiconductor transactions with Russia.

Intel and AMD stop selling semiconductors to Russia, TSMC also participates in sanctions and may affect Russian domestic chips --GIGAZINE

Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs has announced new restrictions on semiconductor exports to Russia and Belarus. This restriction will prevent Taiwan-based companies from exporting semiconductors that meet any of the following conditions to Russia and Belarus.

・ Calculation processing performance is 5GFLOPS or higher
・ Operating frequency is 25MHz or higher
・ ALU bit size is 32bit or more
・ Equipped with interconnection performance with a data transfer rate of 2.5MB / s or more
・ The number of pins exceeds 144
・ Basic propagation delay time is less than 0.4 nanoseconds

Tom's Hardware, an IT news site, is a semiconductor that can be exported from Taiwan to Russia and Belarus, considering that the CPU installed in the PS2 of the home video game console that appeared in 2000 has an operating frequency of 150 MHz and a computing capacity of 6.2 GFLOPS. Points out that only performance below the PS2 CPU is allowed.

In Russia, where transactions with major semiconductor companies have become difficult, the introduction of Chinese-made x86 processors as CPUs for desktop PCs is being considered. However, it has been reported that those processors are far below the processing power of the processors installed in smartphones such as the iPhone.

What is the Chinese x86 chip that will be replaced by Russia, which Intel and AMD have banned from exporting? --GIGAZINE