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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.
I would, i'd like my spying more diversified rather than having everything i do tracked by a single agency.
about time to become independent and make surveillance harder
Fear of whoever. You don't try to guess the intentions of other countries. They can change. You figure out their capabilities and then have back up plans.
After Stuxnet and some of the other recent attacks around the world, I'd be a bit concerned about using foreign made technology in critical control systems. Who knows what's been inserted in the silicon.
Even without that, if I were the Russians and facing the uncertainty they are, I'd want to maintain the ability to make my own chips if things soured further with the west, (or the Chinese. Just because things are going reasonably well between Moscow and Beijing doesn't mean they always will be).
Why go through all that effort reinventing the wheel? It would be much easier to invalidate foreign copyrights and simply pirate everything.
More likely it's for increased security and avoiding a single-supplier system, plus a bit of economic stimulus added in for good measure.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Because sometimes, the best way to learn how to make a wheel is to reinvent it. Copying is also good for learning, but if you really want to master the technology you have to build something from scratch.
Most (sane) people have already. I think still using Facebook tells a lot about you, none of it positive.
...these chips most likely won't actually be delivered until 2016...
I don't see why there would be such a delay when the article says:
The company finalized development of Elbrus-4C in April 2014, and began mass production last fall.
As for the "five years behind comment" (which was not anyone bragging but instead criticising), I suspect that the article mashed together two different quotes into one. In terms of performance (which put them between the i3 & i5), they are five years behind mainstream performance. But it is difficult to compare this and the other performance metrics because of the architectural differences. This isn't a x86 CPU, it is more of a hybrid design. It runs at a very low clock speed (800MHz) and it's power requirements (45W) are low for a 65nm process.
It's not really the important part of the story though. For some countries affected by US export restrictions, having an alternate supplier makes them better than nothing. This CPU will not make the company a household name in the West, but they will continue to have a market in the places that the big boys can't play.
We can't trust the Asian chips anymore.
These are fabricated in Taiwan. You had best keep using your abacus for a while longer.
The US isn't richer because of it's adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq and Russian won't be richer because of it's adventures in Ukraine, Georgia,etc. It's more likely to be bankrupt or in ruins. Of course by that time there will be no independent journalists to ask questions and everything will be glorious much in the way that it is becoming in Venezuela.
I can see that math isn't your strong suit. Five bits of data listed, and you only see four.
The more important thing is, you do not value your privacy. Other people do. It is no one's business who I saw on vacation. I may have met a KGB agent, or I may have met my mistress, or I may have talked to a "spiritual advisor", or I may have just basked in the solitude of the wilderness. And - it's no one's business.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Although I am browsing for the components to build a new computer, I am using a machine considerably more than five years old. Performance is acceptable in almost all cases. It is more than adequate for business purposes. The primary reason I am shopping for a new machine, is reliability. The individual components are all past their expected life expectancy. In short, I fully expect it to crash one day in the not-distant future, and never start up again.
Five year old technology would serve me fine, if I could find new components. And, that same technology would serve 90% of the business and home markets as well.
Specifically, I'm running the second incarnation of the Sledgehammer chip. One of the first dual core Opterons. This Opteron is an upgrade - the same motherboard hosted a first generation Sledgehammer before that.
Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 165 /0/4
product: Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 165
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD]
bus info: cpu@0
width: 64 bits
capabilities:
mathematical co-processor,
FPU exceptions reporting,
wp,
virtual mode extensions,
debugging extensions,
page size extensions,
time stamp counter,
model-specific registers,
4GB+ memory addressing (Physical Address Extension),
machine check exceptions,
compare and exchange 8-byte,
on-chip advanced programmable interrupt controller (APIC),
fast system calls,
memory type range registers,
page global enable,
machine check architecture,
conditional move instruction,
page attribute table,
36-bit page size extensions,
clflush,
multimedia extensions (MMX),
fast floating point save/restore,
streaming SIMD extensions (SSE),
streaming SIMD extensions (SSE2),
HyperThreading,
fast system calls,
no-execute bit (NX),
multimedia extensions (MMXExt),
fxsr_opt,
64bits extensions (x86-64),
multimedia extensions (3DNow!Ext),
multimedia extensions (3DNow!),
rep_good,
nopl,
pni,
lahf_lm,
cmp_legacy,
vmmcall
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's called data mining. It's a business that you have to learn on your own so don't bother. We can all tell you aren't up for it just from the question you asked.
With an economy 97% based on carbon energy when the rest of the world does something about climate change (and it's not that far off, it's already started with solar power becoming cheaper than coal power) Russia will be left high and dry in a economy worse than the 90's. This will be entirely Putin's fault because he's prioritized carbon based energy above everything else.
Like all things Russian this attempt at self production will fail because the corruption and governance problem (the true hallmark of Putin's Russia) will destroy all Russian competitiveness internationally and locally. As with all things it will be cheaper to buy smuggled in western products at near 50% black market markup rather than purchase a Russian produced item that's paid a 10% bribe at every step of production, transport and distribution.
Putin's Russia cut it's own throat when he based on the economy entirely on carbon and allowed the sickness of corruption and bribery to flourish.