Elbrus is very much security first chip/OS for Russia.
With primary goal to avoid any western IP.
The performance is probably ~5 years behind industry standard and price is probably 5-20x more. But that's fine, when the only buyer is government agencies and military contractors.
5 years behind for a system you can actually use is pretty decent IMO. For a massive capital intensive business, high-tech, and with a much smaller internal market than China, that's quite an achievement.
> 5 years behind for a system you can actually use is pretty decent IMO.
And probably more than adequate for the kinds of applications you'd use this in. Military technology needs to be state-of-the-art for ruggedness and reliability, not performance.
For a similar example, look at the CPUs used in space missions: based on performance specs alone, the best ones would have been state-of-the-art in the 90s.
> 5 years behind for a system you can actually use is pretty decent IMO.
Yes, Intel chips aren't much faster now than they were 5 years ago. I vaguely remember reading on Anandtech that Haswell was the last generation that Intel was able to increase the IPC (instructions per cycle) by 15% over the previous generation, and nowadays the typical generational improvement is ~5%.
According to my calculations, that would mean that the latest generation of Intel chips would be ~27% faster than the Elbrus: (1 + 5%)^5 - 1
Emulated x86 performance is somewhere around 1000 passmark units, roughly like Core Duo Pentium. Native number crunching is very impressive. Price is high to enable embezzlement of money by the top people in the Russian government.
So unlike Transmeta, you can actually disable the x86 emulation and run native VLIW code on an Elbrus CPU? It's interesting. But I guess it's still not useful to independent developers in the FOSS community, it appears that MCST’s proprietary C/C++ compiler is the only compiler that can target the CPU.
Why only government agencies and military contractors? I couldn't find a price indication, but it might be interesting for security minded people in general. If it doesn't have any western IP in it, it might be resistant to influence in general. Who knows what kind of "design constraints" intelligence agencies are enforcing upon our chip manufacturers.
What better chip to use than one that the Russian government assumes is only going to be used by loyal compatriots anyway? Anyway, that sounds like something a Russian spy would say, so make of it what you will.
I'd contemplate buying it if it had less binary blobs in it than an Intel or an AMD does. But maybe we don't have to go to Russia for that, as it feels like PC compliant ARM builds are going to be a thing soon.
Is that a jab at Itanium? Anyway 2ghz is a very 2020 speed, there's loads of brand new processors operating at that speed, especially when they've got 16 cores.
Looking again, it's 8 cores at 1.5 GHz which is probably equivalent to 1 GHz out-of-order cores. I'd guess similar single-thread performance to a Pentium III.
The performance is probably ~5 years behind industry standard and price is probably 5-20x more. But that's fine, when the only buyer is government agencies and military contractors.