Russia’s homegrown Elbrus processor and PC would be fantastic in 1999 - martinhudinted

Elbrus MCST, the Russian PC couturier who was once feared A a likely competitor to Intel, has released PCs based along its latest homegrown microprocessors—and, well, Intel has nothing to fear.

Yes, the Elbrus-4C runs 64-bit X86 code written for AMD and Intel microprocessors. Only although the chip contains four cores, each runs at a paltry 800MHz—the speed at which Intel's Pentium III challenged AMD's Athlonin 1999. And the Elbrus chip, built upon ancient 65nm technology (current Intel chips are at 14nm), crapper't even do the code natively, but must rede it.

Elbrus began selling the Elbrus ARM-401 minitower survive month, with a list of on the face of it modern specs: Gigabit ethernet, SATA 2.0, IDE, USB 2.0, RS-232, DVI, even a x16 PCI Express slot that rear mansion an AMD Radeon 6000 graphics chip. But it's the main microprocessor that's so caviling, and what lets the whole system down.

Check out this video Elbrus ready-made of the microchip running Doom 3, a game that was released in 2004. Rapid climb in close. Regrettably, accordant to the Elbrus video, a 720MHz version of the Elbrus-4C chip paired with an AMD Radeon HD 6970 hind end barely crack 20 frames per intermediate in places. Paired with a Core i7 920 chip, that plug-in can fly the coop Crysis at over 30 frames per secondly, with antialiasing happening. But with the Elbrus CPU, it struggles.

The story hind end the tale:Fifteen years ago (has it in truth been that long?) Intel was under besieging. Startup Transmeta had developed a transplantable processor that claimed to run more power-efficiently than Intel, using X86 code that IT natively understood and translated. Elbrus, a mysterious Russian inauguration, claimed to have taken the same approach. (Unfortunately my own stories at ExtremeTech.com are no more available; The Register has caterpillar-tracked some of Elbrus' youth, including the in style news.) But Elbrus ne'er emerged equally the Intel challenger some expected IT to represent, and today the companionship's PCs just seem tender by comparison.

A Russian office PC

To be reasonable, Elbrus isn't selling the Elbrus ARM-401 as anything other than an office PC—and, presumptively, it's going to struggle at that. Since it's non intrinsically compatible with the X86 architecture, Elbrus ships IT with its own "Elbrus OS," which is probably a Linux derivative. It also comes bundled with several open-source software packages: LibreOffice, Firefox, Sylpheed, Linphone, and GIMP, according to the Elbrus page.

elbrus arm 401 motherboard — The Elbrus motherboard.

If for some reason Elbrus were to be competent to advertize the Limb-401 to the clock speeds expected past advanced processors—say, all over 2GHz—then we power expect the chip's performance to climb to a point where IT might be worth comparing IT to other budget processors. And some aspects of the ARM-401 are interesting, including the fact that its specifications say that it ships with a whopping 24GB of memory and that the Elbrus chip itself can calculate 50 gigaflops per ordinal, meridian. (By comparison, QuikMark 0.4 reports that the CORE i5-based Airfoil In favour of 3 can calculate 57 Gflops.)

Only for now, the Elbrus PCs remain a curiosity. It's likely that they'll never ship out of doors Mother Russia, and if they do, IT will be to a computer museum. You're still punter off buying processors from good erstwhile American vendors AMD and Intel.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/427402/russias-homegrown-elbrus-processor-and-pc-would-be-fantastic-in-1999.html

Posted by: martinhudinted.blogspot.com