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Russian-Made Elbrus CPUs Fail Trials, 'A Completely Unacceptable Platform'
SberTech, a technology arm of Sber, Russia's biggest bank, has evaluated the Russian-made MCST Elbrus-8C processors in multiple workloads, but the results were utterly disappointing and the processors failed the test. The testers cited "Insufficient memory, slow memory, few cores, low frequency. Functional requirements not been met at all" as key reasons for the failure. However, there is hope, according to SberTech engineers.
[...] "The Elbrus-8C server is very weak compared to Intel Xeon 'Cascade Lake'," said Anton Zhbankov, a representative for SberTech, said at the Elbrus Partner Day conference (via ServerNews.ru) earlier this month. "Insufficient memory [256MB], slow memory, few cores, low frequency. Functional requirements not been met at all."
[...] In fact, SberTech's evaluation was the first in-depth testing of the Elbrus-8C platform in a banking application. The evaluators compared dual- and quad-socket Elbrus-8C machines (16 - 32 cores per box) to a dual-processor server based on Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 processor that the company currently uses. SberTech could not test the more powerful Elbrus-8CB as it is still not available despite being formally introduced.
[...] "One of the surprising things about the Elbrus-8C server was that it is a real product," said Zhbankov. "It was a real server that we were given. [...] It is an actual product that has its disadvantages, loads of disadvantages, but we can work with them."
[...] [While] SberTech's engineers expected the Elbrus-8C machine to perform much worse and be orders of magnitude slower than Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 machine from 2019, even a two to three times performance difference is significant enough for commercial companies not to deploy a platform since it makes no financial sense. "At the moment, Sberbank says no, we cannot deploy Elbrus machines into our ecosystem, but we are pleasantly surprised that it works at all," said Zhbankov.
The complaints were only partly about the CPU's relatively low performance, with problems concerning the build quality of the server(s) being highlighted.
1.3 GHz 8-core, 8-thread CPU does not beat 20-core, 40-thread Xeon. Surprise?
Previously: Programming Guide for Russia's "28nm" Elbrus-8CB CPU Published
(Score: 3, Informative) by pe1rxq on Monday December 27 2021, @07:32PM (2 children)
It is probably 256MB of cache memory.
This would be in line with the other Elbrus CPUs which had slightly smaller cache sizes. (E.g. 128MB L3 on the Elbrus 8SV)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday December 27 2021, @08:29PM (1 child)
That would be a lot of L3, even if it was divided over 4 chips (quad-socket). Xeon Gold 6230 only has 27.5 MiB. Elbrus 8SV [wikipedia.org] has 16 MiB, not 128 MiB.
I fear the insufficient memory is referring to something more horrifying. I didn't see anything on the linked Russian page.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @12:55AM
These *are* VLIW, so maybe they need all that cache. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sra-centr8/icepeakitx-elbrus-8cb [crowdsupply.com] the newer version takes DDR4 it seems.