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

about time

[Anonymous Coward]

About time. We can't trust the Asian chips anymore.

At least the Ruskies have good security.

Re:about time

[Gadget_Guy]

We can't trust the Asian chips anymore.

These are fabricated in Taiwan. You had best keep using your abacus for a while longer.

Re:about time

[ArcadeMan]

Lev Andropov: It's stuck, yes?
Watts: Back off! You don't know the components!
Lev Andropov: [annoyed] Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!

Re:about time

[Gadget_Guy]

Russia does have fabs. The Mikron Group made the Elbrus-2SM processor. They can't do less than a 90nm process yet.

Re:only i3/i5

[Anonymous Coward]

I would, i'd like my spying more diversified rather than having everything i do tracked by a single agency.

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?

[Hartree]

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).

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.

Re:Fear of the West?

[excelsior_gr]

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.

things getting harder for NSA, which is good

[ltorvalds024]

about time to become independent and make surveillance harder

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

[gman003]

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.

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:5 year lag pretty good

[Gadget_Guy]

...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.

In Soviet Russia...

[MarcNicholas]

....chips overclock *you*!

Re: Which architecture?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Which architecture?

[Xolotl]

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.

Re:How will this compete?

[edmudama]

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.

Re: Which architecture?

[Xolotl]

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.

Re: Which architecture?

[Xolotl]

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.

Canada too

[ArcadeMan]

We've started developing our own processors too, but since they're made of wood they tend to ignite past 400MHz.

Isn't it about time to change this meme to...

[RandomFactor]

In Putin's Russia... ?

Re: only i3/i5

[Runaway1956]

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.

Re:How will this compete?

[Runaway1956]

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