Hardware and software news January 31, 2023, 11:24
The Russians are bad at modern technologies, as exemplified by their latest Elbrus processor. It turns out that the 8-core chip is so weak that it can barely handle even old games.
The sanctions imposed on Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine took a heavy toll on the economy. Particularly painful is the lack of modern microprocessors, without which no country is able to function. Russia is trying to reduce this problem with self-designed systems, but it is doing poorly.
Developed to meet the needs of the local market two processors – Baikal and Elbrus, the former was created for servers, while the latter is aimed at the consumer market. Elbrus-8SV is a completely new, 8-core unit, using outdated 28 nm technology and clocked at 1.5 GHz. It has 16 MB of L3 cache shared by all cores and boasts a performance of 576 GFLOPS FP32 and 288 GFLOPS FP64. The processor also supports ECC DDR4-2400 RAM in a quad-channel arrangement, as well as the Elbrus 7.1 operating system based on Linux 5.4.
Already on paper these are not impressive parameters, but in practice it is even worse. The tests show that the processor does poorly even with very “basic” games. This is confirmed by a test conducted by the Russian YouTuber Elbrus PC Play, who checked this unit in combination with 32 GB of DDR4 memory and an AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics card. Games such as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, STALKER: Call of Pripyat, STALKER: Clear Sky, CS:GO and PUBG clone.
The results probably did not turn out to be a big surprise, because the processor was not able to provide the aforementioned titles with animation fluidity at the appropriate level. In CS:GO, the frame rate ranged from 10 to 30, STALKER: Clear Sky barely managed to reach 10 fps, and Call of Pripyat was 10-20 fps. It was a bit better in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, because here, depending on the location, we managed to achieve from 30 to 200 fps. The YouTuber also ran some older titles on the CPU using emulators, but they didn’t perform very well.
The Russian processor does not cope with games
The test carried out shows that The Elbrus 8SV is far from modern standards. It is also difficult to say whether the constructors optimized it for cooperation with the native operating system, and whether they took into account its operation in games when designing.
The MCST company, responsible for the Elbrus processors, claims, however, that this is not its last word. It recently announced a more modern Elbrus-16C chip, which will use 16 nm technology, will have 16 cores and a clock speed of 2 GHz. It will also support 8-channel RAM, and its performance is to be 1500 GFLOPS FP32 and 750 GFLOPS FP64. On paper, this is 2.6 times more efficient than the Elbrus 8SV, but still far behind even the weakest modern processors.
Elbrus-8CB. Source: Moscow SPARC Technology Center
Of course, the processor itself is not everything. The key question is whether it will be possible to start its production at all. The sanctions imposed on the country meant that Taiwanese factories could not fulfill orders from Russia for processors clocked at 25 MHz or faster. So it seems that new systems designed by Russian companies will exist only on paper for a long time.
