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Russian Company Unveils Homegrown PC Chips
Reader WheatGrass shares the news from Russia Insider that MCST, Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies, has begun taking orders for Russian-made computer chips, though at least one expert quoted warns that the technology lags five years behind that of western companies; that sounds about right, in that the chips are described as "comparable with Intel Corp’s Core i3 and Intel Core i5 processors." Also from the article: Besides the chips, MCST unveiled a new PC, the Elbrus ARM-401 which is powered by the Elbrus-4C chip and runs its own Linux-based Elbrus operating system. MCST said that other operating systems, including Microsoft’s Windows and other Linux distributions, can be installed on the Elbrus ARM-401. Finally, the company has built its own data center server rack, the Elbrus-4.4, which is powered by four Elbrus-4C microprocessors and supports up to 384GB of RAM.
Elbrus-family chips have been around since the 1970s and have their own (Elbrus) architecture. The Elbrus-2000 derivatives such as the Elbrus-4S (the article seems to have confused the Cyrillic C which is a Latin S) support the Elbrus native ISA and alongside that x86 via a Transmeta-like dynamic translation.
Sadly, their brags of "only five years behind" is an underestimate. It's a 65nm chip - its heyday was 2006-2007, on tail-end Pentium IVs, early Core 2, and Phenoms. 45nm hit in 2008, followed by 32nm in 2010. In 2012 Intel hit 22nm, but most others were on a 28nm half-node. Currently, 14nm is shipping from some vendors, and the rest are gearing up for it.
Account for the fact that these chips most likely won't actually be delivered until 2016, and you'll see they're really 10 years behind, not 5. That will probably still be fine for desktops or industrial use, but mobile is out, and servers will be very inefficient compared to modern ones.
Plus, they don't have to compete outside of Russia and other ITAR countries.
They only have to be more trustworthy than what can be imported, and "good enough" for the job at hand.
More data, damnit!
No. The early (Elbrus-1 and -2) were mainframes with some architectural similarities to Burroughs mainframes (the Russians studied the western architectures, but the design itself was independent). The Elbrus-3 (which was the ancestor of the new chips as well as a parallel line implementing the SPARC ISA) was a new VLIW design, but again aimed at the mini/super/mainframe class and multiprocessing, and again independently designed.
Just to add to my comment, really the modern Elbrus line and its use of VLIW/EPIC is most closely equivalent to the Itanium, indeed the Elbrus-2000 which implemented the Elbrus-3 architecture along with x86 dynamic translation was touted as a Merced competitor, but they (the Russians) couldn't really fund it at the time. Elbrus-4S is derived from that lineage.
I would almost certainly prefer the FSB to see what I am doing rather than the NSA. The FSB aren't able to knock down my door and throw me in jail for thought crimes like the NSA can.
You, my friend, know nothing about the FSB.
The NSA can gather all your information and store it on a server for a set amount of time. The FSB can do this indefinitely, can imprison you without any justification, subject you to whatever torture they deem necessary, and can even outright kill you if they so wish. They are literally what came out of the ashes of the KGB. I'm not condoning the NSA's actions, but they are a far cry from the FSB by any definition.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Russia does have fabs. The Mikron Group made the Elbrus-2SM processor. They can't do less than a 90nm process yet.