The Russian company MCST (Moscow Center for SPARC Technologies) has released the Elbrus-4C, a reasonably high-performance quad-core CPU that may grant Russia some technological independence from American chip-making giants Intel and AMD.
Despite the company's name, the Elbrus-4C uses the Elbrus ISA (instruction set architecture), not SPARC. Elbrus is a closed and proprietary architecture, so exact details are hard to come by, but we do know about one particularly interesting feature: x86 emulation. If you remember the Transmeta Crusoe, it sounds like the Elbrus architecture does something very similar: at run-time, x86 program code can be translated and executed through a virtual machine. This method isn't as fast as providing x86 support in hardware, but it gets the job done.
The Elbrus-4C, while highly advanced by home-grown Russian standards, is by no means a bleeding-edge chip; it's a quad-core part built on TSMC's last-last-generation 65nm process. It's capable of hitting a rather heady clockspeed of 800MHz, which equates to (a fairly decent) 25 gigaflops of 64-bit double-precision math. The tech specs say that the Elbrus-4C has 986 million transistors, which is pretty hefty considering there's no integrated GPU. All in all, Elbrus-4C is probably a few years behind western chips, but it's difficult to make a direct comparison.
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