Slashdot Mirror
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.
About time. We can't trust the Asian chips anymore.
At least the Ruskies have good security.
I would, i'd like my spying more diversified rather than having everything i do tracked by a single agency.
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.
about time to become independent and make surveillance harder
There's little we couldn't do 5 years ago because of lack CPU power that we can magically do today. Scientific computing included.
....chips overclock *you*!
Hey, I like my AMD A8 laptop. Paid $305 for it 3 years ago. 17.3" of quad core HeaP glory.
It is a mix : an arm 6 derived core with sparc 9 ISA with x86 emulation.
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.
Were the early Elbrus chips reversed-engineered from designs used in American pinball machines or something?
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!
Thankfully I don't buy or use prebuilt PC's. And I will not use a motherboard that doesn't allow turning off secure boot.
Most (sane) people have already. I think still using Facebook tells a lot about you, none of it positive.
Most (sane) people have already. I think still using Facebook tells a lot about you, none of it positive.
Yeah, it says you share pictures of your vacations with friends and family. What idiot would do that?
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.
Architecturally the Itanium line is the closest western equivalent to the Elbrus (though without Elbrus' x68 translation), and the Itanium Tukwila from 2010 was 65nm. Hence the 5 years.
We've started developing our own processors too, but since they're made of wood they tend to ignite past 400MHz.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
$4000 is for a very early complete unit. It's really more of a developers kit at this point. The article you cite says the price will fall substantially when mass production begins.
So $4000 gives you early access to what they doubtless hope will be a big market when they start selling real units. If you want your code running on the boxes when they hit the market, that's just an ordinary business expense.
In Putin's Russia... ?
--- Mercutio was right.
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
Sharing is double-good!
That should be doubleplusgood, Citizen. Your lack of zeal in learning the appropriate forms of Newspeak have been duly noted here at the Miniluv. You will be contacted.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
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
You don't need a high end chip for gaming though, it's mostly GPU-bound.
I beg to differ. Some very popular games are also very CPU-bound. GTA V, Kerbal Space Program, and Project CARS are three well known titles I can think of off the top of my head that run a lot worse on the Phenom II X6 1045 (2.7GHz hex-core which I overclocked to 3.5GHz) in my secondary gaming machine than on the i7-4970k (4GHz quad-core, not overclocked) in my main desktop. Both machines have SSDs, 32GB of RAM, and GeForce 970 graphics so the CPU is the only significant difference.
AI and physics simulation still lean heavily on the CPU. Here's some benchmarks from Project CARS (which just came out last week) showing how important CPU performance is when simulating 30 cars on the track: http://pclab.pl/art63572-29.ht... (article is in Polish but numbers don't need translation)
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Intel was significantly ahead of everyone else. Then AMD provided better performance per dollar even at a larger process size by choosing a better design. Then Intel beat them again. Next, ARM was suddenly outselling both when performance- per-watt became the key yardstick. Things change in the CPU market.
Ten years from now, 64-core processors may be competing against 128-core processors and there's no guarantee that either Intel or ARM would have the best design. Mybe in ten years it'll be all about not RISC vs CISC but EIS, Expanded Instruction Set.
About time. We can't trust the Asian chips anymore.
At least the Ruskies have good security.
What would make chips from this Asian country (Russia) inherently better than chips from another Asian country? And yes, given that nearly 1/3 of Asia is Russian territory it should be safe to call Russia an Asian country.
Geographically, it might be in Asia, but culturally, the majority of people aren't. And even if that weren't the case, what the hell does it mean Asian? Central Asian? Far East Asian? Siberian? Those three grossly oversimplified labels apply to Russia (and many other former USSR states for that matter.) Grossly oversimplified as they are, these stand for significantly different things.
And we are only discussing the Asian'ness of Russia, without even entering into the whole continent? Asian as in the Near East/Asia Minor? Central Asia as in Iran or Kazakhstan or Mongolia (the later, culturally, is a Central Asian nation)? Far East as in China, the Korean Peninsula or Japan? Japan in many ways is a unique Western Country, or a country whose Asian'ness is no longer in tandem with what 'Far East Asia' embodies. And we are not even touching South East Asia and South Asia at all.
Russia escapes such ridiculous descriptions. For all practical purposes, culturally, politically and economically, it is a European country. It is not a Western country, but neither is most of Eastern Europe.
And the term "Asian" means so many things that by itself, it almost means nothing.