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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: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday December 27 2021, @07:41PM (5 children)
All they need is comrade-in-chief Putin to write use-Russia-made-only into law and everybody will HAVE to use them processors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @08:30PM (1 child)
they are not there yet, but at least taking some first steps.
the trolling part refers to the pentium 4 prescott, and the other unrelated shortcuts intel took to get speed, that eventually lead to the various famous security bugs...
i wish EU had similar desires, as komrad putin, and had embraced the ARM or some other open arch "back in the days".
opensparc had entire complex cpu, if memory serves, more then a decade ago...
-zug
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fraxinus-tree on Monday December 27 2021, @10:25PM
EU doesn't have the "military above all, war imminent" attitude to everything like Russia has. EU is more like "trade with everyone, the politics will follow the money and the military is only to keep Russia calm". This is why EU is OK about CPUs being made in Taiwan as long as all the photolitography equipment is made in the Netherlands.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fraxinus-tree on Monday December 27 2021, @10:32PM (2 children)
Putin pretty much would, if he could. Looks like they not only don't have the capacity, but they don't have the prospect of capacity to use them exclusively in any (however small) part of the government. The only purpose of these CPUs is the illusion of self-sufficiency.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @01:36PM (1 child)
There is classic Russian scheme of doing things, imitate work, throw a show for general public and take money to connected officials pockets. I've seen this with GLONASS - Russians had head start, somehow manufactured few receiver modules and made it mandatory that all navigation devices sold in Russia must be compatible with GLONASS, and in few months time Swiss and Taiwanese manufacturers delivered their own GLONASS receivers that were order or two magnitudes better in power consumption. Well maybe those Russian ones could withstand nuclear strike and associated EMP, but for general consumer it is hard to sell a phone which lasts two hours on a charge:) And they will still use western semiconductors and in case of embargo will smuggle it, but I don't believe that there will viable semiconductor industry in Russia. In soviet times they copied western designs (usually poorly) and even for military purposes their quality assurance was so bad, that they turned to cherry picking working chips (with rates like 1 good chip in 1000 batch).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @08:16PM
> There is classic
Russiancorrupt scheme of doing things...There us nothing Russian about it. If our corporate overlords could still do it here, they would. And they're trying.