Russia's Elbrus-8SV CPU goes retro gaming:
Russia doesn't have many homegrown processors — the Elbrus and Baikal are probably the two most popular chips in the country. While they may not be among the best CPUs, their importance has grown now that major chipmakers AMD and Intel halted processor sales to the country. They're also apparently capable of gaming, as we can see from a series of gaming benchmarks from a Russian YouTuber. They even used Russia's own domestic operating system for the tests.
The Elbrus-8SV, a product of TSMC's 28nm process node, comes with eight cores at 1.5 GHz. Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies(MCST) developed the Elbrus-8SV to be the successor to the original Elbrus-8S, which had eight cores at 1.3 GHz. As a result, the Elbrus-8SV arrives with double the performance of the Elbrus-8S. The Elbrus-8SV offers 576 GFLOPs of single precision and 288 GFLOPs of double precision. In addition, the octa-core processor rocks 16 MB of L3 cache shared between each core, contributing to 2 MB per core.
By default, the Elbrus-8SV supports up to four channels of DDR4-2400 ECC memory with a memory throughput of 68.3 GBps. It's a significant upgrade over the Elbrus-8S that embraced DDR3-1600 memory. The Elbrus-8SV's attributes may not sound impressive, but there aren't many options in the Russian market.
YouTube channel Elbrus PC Play (opens in new tab) put the Elbrus-8SV through its paces in some childhood classic titles, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The reviewer paired the Elbrus-8SV processor with 32 GB of DDR4 ECC memory and an aging Radeon RX 580. The test system was on Russia's domestic Elbrus OS 7.1 operating system, based on Linux 5.4.
The Elbrus-8SV ran The Dark Mod pretty well, delivering frame rates between 30 FPS and 60 FPS at low settings. The chip had no problems with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, either. But, again, the frame rates oscillated between 30 FPS and 200 FPS, depending on the complexity of the scenes.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat gave the Elbrus-8SV a hard time. At medium settings, the frame rates hardly surpassed 30 FPS. They were between the 10 and 20 FPS range, with occasional freezes during the test. The chip didn't have much luck with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. The reviewer observed similar performance and scenes where the Elbrus-8SV was at 10 FPS flat. Elbrus PC Play also tested a few less popular titles, and the performance was a mixed bad.
The results speak for themselves. The Elbrus-8SV is far from being a gaming powerhouse. Some of the tested titles were over ten years old. Then there's the question of compatibility. Unfortunately, the Russian chip isn't on the compatibility list for many modern titles, so it's relegated to running older games or console emulators.
(Score: 5, Funny) by turgid on Wednesday February 01, @09:43PM (2 children)
It can divide by zero, complete an infinite loop in under 1 second, crack all western encryption algorithms, predict the lottery results and tell you what a nice man that Mr Putin is (cat /dev/putin)?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Samantha Wright on Wednesday February 01, @11:06PM
Morrowind was released in 2002. Read the bottom half of TFS again.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Wednesday February 01, @11:58PM
You jest, but it waits for input at exactly the same speed as the best Western processor.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday February 01, @11:34PM
A visitor from Japan was asked what he liked best about the GDR. His answer: The awesome museums. The Pergamon [an actual museum], the Pentacon [an optical instrument combine] and the Robotron [a computer combine].
Robotron beat the West again: They built the first walk-in microchip
How do you know the Stasi is using Robotron surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on you? You got a new walk-in cupboard and there's now a converter hut in front of your house.
The Robotron slogan: "Robotron: Our solutions - Your problem"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday February 01, @11:41PM (4 children)
The STALKER series of games is made by a Ukrainian studio if memory serves me right. So what actual Russian homebrew games are there to run with the Elbrus? After all how many FPS do you really need to play Tetris?
Considering how old the games they appear to test are they might as well have played Doom, did they?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @11:58PM (2 children)
The Dark Mod's engine is based on the id Tech 4 engine used in Doom 3.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Thursday February 02, @12:06AM (1 child)
For some id4 context:
8 years ago Elbrus-4S ~30fps in Doom 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUNJ_tkq2hk [youtube.com]
2 years ago Elbrus-8S ~120fps in Doom 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buWzWtXHimk&t=3125s [youtube.com]
Currently Elbrus-8SV ~30-60fps in Dark Mod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcQLijZwYCU&t=705s [youtube.com]
Anyhow, it's a VLIW so, to my knowledge, many of the ILP issues remain open. Still, they can probably out-perform in-order designs transistor-for-transistor at least so they can still be relevant for many high-reliability applications.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, @12:19AM
Keep in mind The Dark Mod is more difficult to run than vanilla Doom 3 and uses more cores:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/10nfcwj/comment/j68wpnb/?context=3 [reddit.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday February 04, @10:48AM
Volodymyr Yezhov, one of the developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., died defending his homeland against the Russian invaders near Bakhmut on 22 December 2022.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday February 02, @02:05AM (1 child)
The US' blocking access to technology to its enemies (or perceived enemies), be it Russia or China, forces said enemies to scamble not to be reliant on US technology anymore.
It's good for them: it hurts them short term, but ultimately it accelerates their technological leveling up - something they might never have undertaken if the US hadn't started the embargo.
It's good for the rest of us: I want to have the choice between a Zhaoxin, Baikal or Intel CPU. At the very least, in the markets where the Chinese and Russian homegrown processors compete against US equivalents, the price of the US equivalents will drop. I can't wait for *that* to happen.
But it's not good for the US: US companies will utlimately find themselves with unwanted competition. As for the US administration, they could only use their embargo switch once, and it won't work a second time. Not to mention, the US' allies also see what's happening and will probably also quietly develop technology to lessen their own dependance on US tech - albeit at a slower pace - just in case the US decides to dissolve the friendship some day.
In short, the ultimate loser is the US.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, @03:55AM
> But it's not good for the US
Disagree. It is good for the segments of the US that don't want to lock in a stagnant monopoly. It is good for competition, i.e. those who want to compete, but not for shady deals in smoky rooms where it's about who you know.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday February 02, @02:59AM (1 child)
How does going from 8 cores at 1.3GHz to 8 cores at 1.5GHz double performance? Faster memory access? Better predictive execution?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday February 02, @03:08AM
Just like a modern car with 100hp goes faster than a car from the 60s with 100hp: clock speed and number of cores aren't the only factors.
The designers optimized the cache, microcode or whatever else. But for some reason, the only things that are reported about processors are clock speed and number of cores, despite the fact that clock speed stopped correlating linearly with processor speed decades ago when processors started getting pipelines, and has in fact become a really poor indicator of performance in the past 15 years.