This is entirely hopeless - their development budget is 0.05% of that of Intel. So these will never leave drawing board to become usable product, and this is not a field rational to invest in - general purpose processors are olygopoly market with decades long learning curve worth too much. Even if someone puts hundreds of billions dollars and decades of time to become competitive, this will only diminish returns in the industry as whole so will be anyway bad investment: at best they could sink Intel into unprofitably small ROIs, and get similar ROIs themselves. So aside from pure politics ('Russia is the motherland of elephants') i see no purpose for anyone doing it.
Running through Google translate [1] gives pretty sparse press release on the Elbrus-8. Interesting bits are 'binary translation of x86' and '25 instructions at one' so a 25 instruction super scalar pipeline and dynamic instruction translation, historically has been slow as the proverbial pig on non-native code. That arose from an incredible amount of memory churn (MemOPS) when running translated code slowing the processor down to the cycle time of DRAM (110 - 130nS or about a 10Mhz effective instruction rate[2].<p>I get the nationalist pride in wanting to build your own system but I think they could do wonders licensing the ARM A5x cores and starting from there rather than pushing so hard down the 'everything our self' road. Just look at the success many Chinese companies have had taking the ARM path (Allwinner is probably the most familiar example).<p>If there is someone reading who is part of this program or can advise them, I'd suggest they focus on building a 28nm FAB capability ala TSMC that they can use to make their own chips. Build a reliable semiconductor process and pipeline, and the use state money to subsidize the costs to pull foreign contracts into your FAB so that you can get a first look at people's ideas. If you are looking for strategic advantage that is a much better play than pushing out a computer architecture.<p>[1] Possibly translated link: <a href="https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mcst.ru%2Fnovyj-8yadernyj-mikroprocessor-elbrus-8c&edit-text=" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...</a><p>[2] For comparison this was the speed of the PC/AT 286 machine in "turbo" mode.
It's ironical that the top rated comment on HN for the past few hours is going against the "hacker" culture just because it's a government that's doing it?<p>There's no need to for them to match Intel at any level. The current generation of tablets & mobiles is ample proof that an open source OS and with ARM based processor is a good alternative for technical productivity and may very well replace Intel/MS for generic office tasks in the future.<p>As a country in post Snowden/NSA era, it makes absolute sense if they don't want to rely on US companies.
Come on, lets be neutral to this (politically). We should look at this as a new era. So what, If the Russian design today is more expensive or slower than Intel or anyone else.<p>Tomorrow, we might all be using Russian-made processors. History requires only a moment to shift the balance created over our short lifespan.<p>Besides, a little bit of competition between US and Russia has sometimes helped the humanity as a whole. Take the "Space Race" for example. A bit of egotistical competition meant that Apollo 11 landed on moon, many years early than if there was no such competition.
This doesn't seem to be a new ISA, but a continuation of Elbrus E2K. RWT covered Elbrus E2K back in 2000.<p><a href="http://www.realworldtech.com/elbrus/" rel="nofollow">http://www.realworldtech.com/elbrus/</a>
I remember two or so years ago, Russia endorsed ReactOS.<p>But if they are making their own architecture, I doubt programs will transition for them if they plan to still go that route.
This is the one based on ARMv8 ISA, right? It doesn't seem to mention it there.<p>I think that one may be from another company, though:<p><a href="http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/russia-arm-intel-amd-processors,1-2044.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/russia-arm-intel-amd-proce...</a>
> Система программирования платформы поддерживает языки С, С++, Java, Фортран-77, Фортран-90.<p>its interesting they called out support for fortan 77 and fortran 90