Russia Banking On Home Grown CPUs

A Russian firm announced its intention to build its own homegrown CPUs as part of a cunning plan to keep the Americans from spying on the glorious Empire of Tsar Putin and oil oligarchs.

Moscow Centre of SPARC Technologies (MCST) has announced it’s now taking orders for its Russian-made microprocessors from domestic computer and server manufacturers.

Dubbed the Elbrus-4C, it was fully designed and developed in MCST’s Moscow labs. It’s claimed to be the most high-tech processor ever built in Russia. They claim it is comparable with Intel’s Core i3 and Intel Core i5 processors, although they do not say what generation as one spec we found claimed it could manage a blistering 1.3 GHz which is slightly less than an average mobile phone.

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 claimed it can run Windows and Linux distributions. Yhe company has built a data centre server rack, the Elbrus-4.4, which is powered by four Elbrus-4C microprocessors and supports up to 384GB of RAM.

MCST said the Elbrus-4.4 is suitable for web servers, database servers, storage systems, servers, remote desktops and high-performance clusters.

Sergei Viljanen, editor in chief of the Russian-language PCWorld website said that the chip was at least five years behind the west.

“Russian processor technology is still about five years behind the west. Intel’s chips come with a 14nm design, whereas the Elbrus is 65 nm, which means they have a much higher energy consumption.”

MCST’s Elbrus-4C chips are powered by a 4-core processors, and come with an interface for hard drives and other peripherals. The company finalized development of Elbrus-4C in April 2014, and began mass production last autumn.

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Will Arm/Atom CPUs Replace Xeon/Opteron?

Analyst are saying that smartphone chips could one day replace the Xeon and Opteron processors used in most of the world’s top supercomputers. In a paper in a paper titled “Are mobile processors ready for HPC?” researchers at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center wrote that less expensive chips bumping out faster but higher-priced processors in high-performance systems.

In 1993, the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, known as the Top500, was dominated by systems based on vector processors. They were nudged out by less expensive RISC processors. RISC chips were eventually replaced by cheaper commodity processors like Intel’s Xeon and AMD Opteron and now mobile chips are likely to take over.

The transitions had a common thread, the researchers wrote: Microprocessors killed the vector supercomputers because they were “significantly cheaper and greener,” the report said. At the moment low-power chips based on designs ARM fit the bill, but Intel is likely to catch up so it is not likely to mean the death of x86.

The report compared Samsung’s 1.7GHz dual-core Exynos 5250, Nvidia’s 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 and Intel’s 2.4GHz quad-core Core i7-2760QM – which is a desktop chip, rather than a server chip. The researchers said they found that ARM processors were more power-efficient on single-core performance than the Intel processor, and that ARM chips can scale effectively in HPC environments. On a multi-core basis, the ARM chips were as efficient as Intel x86 chips at the same clock frequency, but Intel was more efficient at the highest performance level, the researchers said.

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