
New russian 8-core CPU - oxama
http://www.mcst.ru/novyj-8yadernyj-mikroprocessor-elbrus-8c
======
anovikov
This is entirely hopeless - their development budget is 0.05% of that of
Intel. So these will never leave drawing board to become usable product, and
this is not a field rational to invest in - general purpose processors are
olygopoly market with decades long learning curve worth too much. Even if
someone puts hundreds of billions dollars and decades of time to become
competitive, this will only diminish returns in the industry as whole so will
be anyway bad investment: at best they could sink Intel into unprofitably
small ROIs, and get similar ROIs themselves. So aside from pure politics
('Russia is the motherland of elephants') i see no purpose for anyone doing
it.

~~~
tribaal
I guess it _is_ purely political.

Russia wants to be independent from the US for computers, because they fear
(rightfully) American chips to be bugged.

Having slow, expensive chips made in Russia is probably more interesting to
certain agencies than fast and cheap American chips - or relying on
typewriters :)

~~~
fzltrp
China has a team developping a mips like architecture, with several produced
iterations:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson)

I don't know if Russia has the industry to mass produce it, but surely it has
the skilled people to design it, and it may probably use foreign fabs for the
remaining steps if necessary.

As for the software, with an established ISA, they may quickly leverage
exising open source solutions. Of course, Windows and OSX support will be a
problem (given that they are the major desktop players).

Politic or not, they know it's doable.

~~~
nmrm
If you're just worried about bugged hardware, why develop a new architecture?
Can't you use your own clean room implementation of an existing architecture?

~~~
fzltrp
Someone else mentioned that the architecture is based of Sparc technology
(Sun's line of CPUs, which is a mips derivative iirc). It's hardly a
completely new architecture.

~~~
Narishma
Sparc isn't a derivative of MIPS.

~~~
fzltrp
Thanks for correcting me: indeed, it's an open architecture which was used by
Sun, Fujitsu and TI for their CPUs, and it's unrelated to MIPS.

------
ChuckMcM
Running through Google translate [1] gives pretty sparse press release on the
Elbrus-8. Interesting bits are 'binary translation of x86' and '25
instructions at one' so a 25 instruction super scalar pipeline and dynamic
instruction translation, historically has been slow as the proverbial pig on
non-native code. That arose from an incredible amount of memory churn (MemOPS)
when running translated code slowing the processor down to the cycle time of
DRAM (110 - 130nS or about a 10Mhz effective instruction rate[2].

I get the nationalist pride in wanting to build your own system but I think
they could do wonders licensing the ARM A5x cores and starting from there
rather than pushing so hard down the 'everything our self' road. Just look at
the success many Chinese companies have had taking the ARM path (Allwinner is
probably the most familiar example).

If there is someone reading who is part of this program or can advise them,
I'd suggest they focus on building a 28nm FAB capability ala TSMC that they
can use to make their own chips. Build a reliable semiconductor process and
pipeline, and the use state money to subsidize the costs to pull foreign
contracts into your FAB so that you can get a first look at people's ideas. If
you are looking for strategic advantage that is a much better play than
pushing out a computer architecture.

[1] Possibly translated link:
[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mcst.ru%2Fnovyj-8yadernyj-
mikroprocessor-elbrus-8c&edit-text=)

[2] For comparison this was the speed of the PC/AT 286 machine in "turbo"
mode.

~~~
jensnockert
I doubt it is 25 operation super-scalar, it most likely is a 25-issue VLIW.
Elbrus has been doing them for a long while[1].

I doubt it will be fast on translated code, but Transmeta could do x86-to-VLIW
translation reasonably 10 years ago, so it isn't impossible. If they have
similar software, it should be quite fast. Of course, the Crusoe and Efficeon
are less wide (4 and 8 functional units iirc?) but I doubt x86 is the
preferred instruction set for these, it is probably there to allow mixed-mode
software (x86 OS + some native applications?)

Since it seems to be built for HPC, 3 cpu-to-cpu links, 4 DDR memory
controllers, over 20MB of cache. This probably makes a bit of sense, you could
run a regular x86 version of Linux for most applications and support binary
driver blobs etc. But then compile certain computational software as native
code.

The teams behind this processor probably have built HPC stuff since the
seventies[2], I doubt they would gain anything by switching direction.

[1]
[http://www.realworldtech.com/elbrus/](http://www.realworldtech.com/elbrus/)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_%28computer%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_%28computer%29)

------
chdir
It's ironical that the top rated comment on HN for the past few hours is going
against the "hacker" culture just because it's a government that's doing it?

There's no need to for them to match Intel at any level. The current
generation of tablets & mobiles is ample proof that an open source OS and with
ARM based processor is a good alternative for technical productivity and may
very well replace Intel/MS for generic office tasks in the future.

As a country in post Snowden/NSA era, it makes absolute sense if they don't
want to rely on US companies.

------
rikacomet
Come on, lets be neutral to this (politically). We should look at this as a
new era. So what, If the Russian design today is more expensive or slower than
Intel or anyone else.

Tomorrow, we might all be using Russian-made processors. History requires only
a moment to shift the balance created over our short lifespan.

Besides, a little bit of competition between US and Russia has sometimes
helped the humanity as a whole. Take the "Space Race" for example. A bit of
egotistical competition meant that Apollo 11 landed on moon, many years early
than if there was no such competition.

------
sanxiyn
This doesn't seem to be a new ISA, but a continuation of Elbrus E2K. RWT
covered Elbrus E2K back in 2000.

[http://www.realworldtech.com/elbrus/](http://www.realworldtech.com/elbrus/)

------
opless
Seems not to be "new" but an implementation of a Sparc V9 ?

~~~
avmich
Elbrus team worked on that architecture before collaboration with Sun - they
can continue to improve it now. So it may have something new?

------
cordite
I remember two or so years ago, Russia endorsed ReactOS.

But if they are making their own architecture, I doubt programs will
transition for them if they plan to still go that route.

------
higherpurpose
This is the one based on ARMv8 ISA, right? It doesn't seem to mention it
there.

I think that one may be from another company, though:

[http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/russia-arm-intel-amd-
proce...](http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/russia-arm-intel-amd-
processors,1-2044.html)

~~~
listic
No, this one is different. T-Systems, who was making supercomputers with Intel
chips, plans to make "its own" ARM-based chips. Elbrus is another, older,
company that is using either SPARC or their own architecture.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_(computer)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_\(computer\))
[http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%B1%D1%80%...](http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%B1%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81_\(%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D1%8C%D1%8E%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80\))

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andyidsinga
> Система программирования платформы поддерживает языки С, С++, Java,
> Фортран-77, Фортран-90.

its interesting they called out support for fortan 77 and fortran 90

~~~
filereaper
If the Russians are developing this chip for their infrastuccture and mission
critical aspects, FORTRAN 77 and 90 support makes sense. Finite Element
Analysis software (CATIA, SolidWorks and the like...) are Fortran or its ilk..

Same goes for HPC.

