Russia's Self-developed Elbrus CPU Parameters Exposed, CEO Is Nearly 90 Years Old and Still Has Not Retired

The parameters of Russia's self-developed CPU were recently exposed. Although there is still a big gap compared to mainstream products, this is also a major progress for Russia on the road of self-research.

Although it is not easy to develop a CPU on your own, many countries have invested huge manpower and funds in this regard in order to avoid being restrained by the United States. The fighting nation Russia has also started the road of self-development of CPU since the 1990s.

recently,The parameters of the eight-core chip Elbrus-8C independently developed by Russia's MCST (Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies) have been exposed.This is Russia's first eight-core microprocessor to enter the civilian market after non-commercial CPUs.

28 nm process, 2.78 billion transistors

In 2015, after MCST launched the quad-core processor Elbrus-4C, it revealed that it had begun developing the next model - the octa-core processor Elbru-8C.

In 2018, the Elbrus-8CB processor was completed and is scheduled to be mass-produced this year. MCST officials recently announced detailed parameters.

Data shows thatThe chip is currently manufactured using a 28nm process (Intel's latest generation processors use a 10nm process).

Like most other complex chips,It is a compiler-oriented design.Because most of the optimizations happen at the compiler level.

The specific parameters of the chip are shown in the table below:

As shown in the table above,The chip has 2.78 billion transistors and a core area ofThe area is 333 square millimeters, and the frequency is only 1.5GHz.The peak floating-point performance is 576GFlops for single precision and 288GFlops for double precision. The memory supports quad-channel DDR4-2400 ECC with a bandwidth of 68.3GB/s.

In terms of cache, each core has 64KB of L1 data cache, 128KB of L1 instruction cache, and 512KB of L2 cache, while all cores share 16MB of L3 cache.

In addition, the processor also supports 4-way server multi-processor combination.But it did not disclose what the protocol or bandwidth was.

According to Russian state-controlled Ruselectronics, the chip is three to five times faster than the previous Elbrus-4S processor, which came out in 2015, and has eight times more I/O channels.

Ruselectronics also said that the chip has the function of "ensuring high information security for its users", but we don't know the details either.

Performance scores are equivalent to AMD's 2009 CPU

A few days ago, MCST also announced the results of the Elbrus-8C processor running Blender 2.8 3D test.The RyzenGraphic_27 model took 2 minutes and 52 seconds to render.

How is this performance? According to industry analysts,AMD's Phenom II X4 965 processor took 2 minutes and 34 seconds to render the same test.A processor like the Core i7-7700K only takes 36 seconds to render, a performance difference of nearly 4-5 times.

You should know that the AMD Phenom II X4 965 processor was released by AMD in 2009. Therefore, although the Elbrus-8C is an octa-core processor, due to the 1.5 GHz frequency and ARM architecture, it still has no advantage over the desktop version of the 4GHz+ X86 processor.

But then again, although Elbrus-8C is still relatively backward compared with the processors on the market when looking at parameter performance alone, this kind of design capability has already surpassed the capabilities of countries above 95% in the world.

The man behind Elrbus: Russia’s first computer engineer

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the developer and manufacturer of this processor isMCST Company of Russia,It was established in 1992 and is a direct subsidiary of the Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering.

MCST previously focused on developing SPARC architecture processors, but in recent years has turned to ARM architecture and has launched a number of single-core, dual-core, quad-core and octa-core ARM processors in the Elbrus series.

MCST was once famous for its supercomputer Elbrus 2000 (E2K for short), which was led by the company's founder Boris Babayan.

Boris Babayan was a key figure in the creation of the Elbrus supercomputer.It was also a pioneer of supercomputing in the Soviet era.

In 1951, at the age of 18, Babayan joined the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which was co-founded by two Nobel Prize winners, Pyotr Kapitsa and Lev Landau.

There, he became the first student of computer science in the former Soviet Union.The field was so new at the time that there was no such thing as “computer engineering”; it was instead called “machine mathematics.” 

In 1978, he developed the world's first superscalar computer, Elbrus-1.More than a decade ahead of the West. Later, Elbrus 2 earned him the Lenin Prize, the most prestigious award in the former Soviet Union.

In 1992, Babayan founded MCST, focusing on the development of the E2K CPU.

In 1999, E2K came out of nowhere and caused a sensation in the industry.The processor can execute Elbrus VLIW and Intel x86 codes simultaneously, can execute 24 instructions per clock cycle, and can bring 10.2GFLOP/s computing performance with an operating frequency of only 1.2GHz.

It could be three times faster than the Intel Itanium server chip that was about to be released at the time. This posed a great threat to Intel at the time.

But at the same time, Russian investors were reluctant to invest in MCST due to the high risks of developing electronic equipment, so the situation for Babayan and his team was not optimistic.

In 2004, Babayan decided to join Intel with the E2K team, as he believed that this was the only way to move beyond Russia and become number one in the world. Babayan has since been the head of microprocessor development at Intel’s Moscow Research Center and became the second European to receive the title of Intel Fellow.

At the same time, Intel obtained some technology licenses from MCST. Therefore, there is a saying that the source of Intel's chip technology comes from Russia.

After 60 years in the technology computing industry, Babayan, who is now in his 80s, still said, "I still have many projects to realize and many technical ideas, so I have no plans to retire."

A small step for Elrbus, a big step for Russia's self-development

In recent years, Russia has tried to wean itself off American-made technology with its own domestic products, and China, South Korea, and Japan have done the same.This is done not only from economic considerations, but also from the perspective of national security.

The United States' suppression of Huawei in recent years has also made us more deeply aware of the importance of having world-leading independent research and development capabilities.

I hope that one day in the future, when people talk about CPU, they won’t just think of Intel and AMD.

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