Politics almost always finds a way to insert itself between technology and its benefits. Most of the time it has negative effects, but occasionally it sparks the development of parallel projects worth a closer look. Today, we're examining the Elbrus-4C processor, created by the Russian company MCST. It's a native chip with a proprietary architecture, but its most striking feature is factory-built x86 emulation.
In mid-April we talked about the blockade that Intel suffered from the US Department of Commerce, which prohibited the sale of Xeon chips to China due to national security concerns. For years we have observed the efforts of the Red Giant of the East to develop a national processor that reduces its dependence on foreign technology, and it is not the only country with that line of thinking. Russia has been working on a similar initiative with its Elbrus processors, designed by the Moscow Center for SPARC Technologies (or MCST in English). The Elbrus chips are inspired by the VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) architecture, making them distant cousins of Itanium processors. While this limits their applications to environments with a high level of parallelism, the new Elbrus-4C, like its predecessors, carries an extra card up its sleeve: x86 emulation.
Some of our readers may remember Transmeta's Crusoe processors. These chips featured a virtual machine capable of translating and executing code meant for x86 hardware. Naturally, this process had an impact on software performance (for example, a 700 MHz Crusoe ran x86 code like a 500 MHz Pentium III), but compatibility tends to be more important, and that's where the Elbrus-4C is headed. Its specs reveal a quad-core processor manufactured at 65 nanometers, with a clock speed of 800 MHz. These numbers are hardly impressive compared to current processors, but under ideal conditions (read: fully optimized software), an Elbrus-4C can deliver 25 GFLOPs in double precision.
Another curious fact is that MCST is already offering a desktop computer with this chip, the ARM-401. Apparently, there's also an server Elbrus 4.4 on the horizon, and an 8C variant that will raise the core count to eight. My Russian is non-existent, but with the magic of the web and some machine translations, we found that the ARM-401 costs 200,000 rubles, about 3,600 euros. For now, the system is only available to government entities, but it's expected that with an acceleration in production of the Elbrus-4C, its price will drop drastically.
