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.

Comments

Fear of the West?

[anchovy_chekov]

I know Russians who are busily working on all sorts of interesting technologies in-house (SCADA, DCS, etc) There seems to be a real fear that if sanctions increase they'll be cut off from technology they need to run their industrial systems. It seems to have sparked a renaissance in the local software community, hell-bent of forging a form of self-reliance. Interesting to see where all this leads.

Re:Fear of the West?

[towermac]

Just one example of how the sanctions are nothing but good for Russia. Nobody in the West seems to get that. You can't make Russians suffer; they do that on their own.

Up is down; black is white, and Putin is brilliant. Russia will be a far stronger, richer, better country when he's done.

Re:Fear of the West?

[edmudama]

Except that a modern CPU is too difficult to manufacture. Copying the transistors in a CAD program is the easy part, building it with a usable yield is the hard part.

5 year lag pretty good

[bangular]

There's little we couldn't do 5 years ago because of lack CPU power that we can magically do today. Scientific computing included.

Re:5 year lag pretty good

[rtb61]

You really don't need all that much CPU power to 'securely' push around data and that's is what will become the number focus for government, 'SECURELY' pushing around data. Any country that does not produce it own chips and tech components leaves itself a slave to those countries that do. A simple shut down code can be embedded anywhere in hardware and be virtually impossible to discover until activated. No country can be trusted with that kind of power over another country. One flick of the switch and all your infrastructure could be shut down, until all of the equipment controlling it has been replaced and this when all of the infrastructure needed to manage that replacement has been shut down. A completely manual process that would take weeks even months, with all digital communications shut down. With a population left to go hungry in the dark with the communications infrastructure required to manage food handling from farm, to processing, to warehousing, to retailing and of course computers in vehicles. Of course defence forces will have insured their transport vehicles are free of digital control systems to ensure electronic durability with a lack of electronics, oh wait. Computers are handy but they are as vulnerable as hell. One ill time major solar flare and we have some pretty severe problems, much like a now opposed country hitting the off switch (the country in the world least to be trusted, should be pretty bloody obvious to everyone by now, USA, USA, USA, well done - not).

Re: Which architecture?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a mix : an arm 6 derived core with sparc 9 ISA with x86 emulation.

Re:things getting harder for NSA, which is good

[Bite The Pillow]

I wasn't expecting a paranoia induced non-sequitur from a kernel maintainer, but here we are.

Certainly, your source code is public, and I could read every line of it. I have maintained that I could, if I wanted to, read and lean and understand and trust every NSA contribution to cryptography. Many disagreed, that I might need some sort of education in maths or something.

My position is now, I don't want to. I don't care what happens to an infiltrated Russian chip maker. I do care what happens to Intel and AMD, because I have 401(k) holdings in both. Great, I didn't have to, I should have directed, but here we are. I didn't.

I could learn every connection in a production chip, not all of them but just enough to make me feel secure. I put a bet on American producers because the moment one vulnerability hits, the company gets fucked. Maybe you'll mention RSA, aka EMC. The guidance from EMC was to follow NIST guidance, or if you had any knowledge of security, do what you knew what was right. In other words carry on and mind the gap.

So what in the fuck is your point? I need to learn making chips now, in addition to learning crypto?

Or do you have an actual solution instead of an attention whoring, obvious, call to buy chips from dubious manufacturers? I don't trust those fucks, and I never will.

So sell me. I run your kernel, I trust your maintainers, and your merges. I need to know how I should trust your code, and not whatever nebulous announcement here on dashslot, owned by Dice Media, makes me want to shite me collective britches.