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 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.
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MCST has already taped out the company's new Elbrus-16C, a 16nm chip that wields 16 cores operating at 2 GHz. It'll also support eight-channel memory and supply up to 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes. In addition, the 16-core chip will bring the single and double precision numbers up to 1,500 GFLOPs and 750 GFLOPs, respectively. That's a 160% improvement over the Elbrus-8SV. It'll be fascinating to see how much higher gaming performance the Elbrus-16C will bring to the table. The only problem is who'll fabricate the chips for Russia since Taiwan has banned the exports of processors that operate at 25 MHz or higher.
Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer
Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
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-Fran- As long as it can play Tetris, it should be fine.
Regards.
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bit_user Thanks for the update. It's interesting to see how this architecture is developing.
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setx Russia doesn't have many homegrown processors — the Elbrus and Baikal are probably the two most popular chips in the country.
If you are trying to imply that Elbrus and Baikal are popular gaming CPUs in Russia then you are completely out of touch with reality. Most gamers never even heard those names... Those are CPUs for state agencies and no one else.
As for actual popular gaming CPUs in Russia, I think it's Xeons and ES chips from Aliexpress. They have good enough performance and absolutely destroy your shills of "best CPUs" in terms of performance/price.
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russell_john bit_user said:
Thanks for the update. It's interesting to see how this architecture is developing.Yeah it went from being 20 years behind to only 15 years behind everyone else
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bit_user russell_john said:
Yeah it went from being 20 years behind to only 15 years behind everyone elseThe main reason I'm interested is that it incorporates certain ideas from VLIW. I want to see how that progresses, as I consider it one possible alternative timeline that Itanium could've followed, had a few decisions been made differently and Intel not cut it off before it could mature. Another such architecture is Tachyum.
We should be open-minded to variations on the dominant ISA paradigms, as we continue to seek faster, cheaper processors in the face of rising semiconductor costs and decelerating improvements from new manufacturing nodes.
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Newoak The real questions are, is this chip strong enough to create night vision? Can it quickly and effectively operate automated tank defenses? Is it enough for russian satellites? How about missiles, can their operating systems be accommodated? I wonder how the rest of the russian high tech industry is holding up. In G-d I trust.
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bit_user Newoak said:
The real questions are, is this chip strong enough to create night vision? Can it quickly and effectively operate automated tank defenses? Is it enough for russian satellites? How about missiles, can their operating systems be accommodated?Based on bits and pieces I've heard from people who seem to have some clue about this stuff (I don't), what I've gathered is those sorts of things typically use FPGAs + microcontrollers. Not that you wouldn't have a general-purpose CPU in some military equipment, but I rather think this CPU is more oriented towards server applications.
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Bamda My 12 yr. old i7-2600K still outperforms that dog.
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bit_user Bamda said:
My 12 yr. old i7-2600K still outperforms that dog.What's weird is they weren't clear whether this is in emulation, but that's what I assume. Otherwise, you'd have to recompile these games, and I don't think any of them are open source.
In terms of raw compute power, it seems each core can issue 48 fp32 ops per cycle (or half that, for fp64). I'm guessing they arrive there by having 2 ports that issue 16-element (512-bit) vector ops, with one of them capable of FMA and the other probably add/sub. Or, maybe 4 ports and 256-bit vectors. Either way, its vector engine seems multiple times as powerful as that of a Sandybridge core.
Before you get too impressed, the iGPU of a Skylake desktop CPU can manage 441 fp32 GFLOPS, or about 76% as much. And the ELBRUS-8SV's fp64 throughput can be surpassed by that of a modest Radeon RX 6500XT dGPU. So, it's not bad for a CPU, but its raw compute power isn't even competitive with the 28 nm era dGPUs.
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d0x360 bit_user said:
The main reason I'm interested is that it incorporates certain ideas from VLIW. I want to see how that progresses, as I consider it one possible alternative timeline that Itanium could've followed, had a few decisions been made differently and Intel not cut it off before it could mature. Another such architecture is Tachyum.We should be open-minded to variations on the dominant ISA paradigms, as we continue to seek faster, cheaper processors in the face of rising semiconductor costs and decelerating improvements from new manufacturing nodes.
The issue is going to be whether or not they have the full instruction set of a modern x86/64 CPU. You can make a chip with tons of cords and high clocks that will perform like a dog in games if it's missing instructions.
It's just like how people with gpus that don't have dx12u tier 2 compliance complaining about game performance or visuals and saying the game is trash or unoptimized when they have a GPU that is missing instructions that are optimization related or needed for a visual feature.
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