WEBVTT

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not long ago we did an episode on a line of cpus that were not made by AMD or

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Intel but rather by an AMD backed chinese joint venture just for the

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chinese market but these aren't the only alternative desktop and server cpus out

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there russia also got in on the fund some years back and it appears the

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company behind it mcst in case you can't read cyrillic is once again producing a

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lineup of cpus called elbrus so why are they doing this and how

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exactly are they different from more traditional offerings to answer we

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collaborated with our friend dr ian cuttress of anontec and we'd like to

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give him a big thank you and a sloppy kiss for his help and after you've done

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watching this video be sure to check out his personal youtube channel techtechpotato for lots of cool insights

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into all things hardware so like china russia is interested in completely

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controlling the silicon that goes into its processors they want to avoid

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potential back doors from chips designed outside the country namely AMD and

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Intel's and maybe even put in a few backdoors of their own the russian

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government has put in orders for lots of albers chips and is even forcing some of

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their own departments to use them but other than being russia controlled what

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makes them distinct well probably the biggest thing is that they're designed

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using a vliw or very long instruction

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word architecture don't you just love how engineers name things anyways what

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this means is that when you write a program for an elbrush chip you pack

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several operations into one instruction meaning the way that CPU runs is more

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parallel than your average x86 core

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that's probably sitting on your desktop or laptop right now in fact AMD had some

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mainstream graphics cards several generations ago that ran on a

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vliw-like architecture since parallel processing is more efficient for

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graphics operations which you can learn more about up here this does make an

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lbrs CPU more difficult to code for especially as the hardware has a much

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more difficult time deciding on its own what the most efficient order to execute

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instructions in would be this is called out of order processing a key feature of

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virtually all modern x86 cpus it also

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means that general performance for something like just running an operating

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system isn't as good as what you'd get on a modern x86 chip although lbrs can

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run x86 base os's and programs through hardware translation you're only looking

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at performance of about 80 of what you get with a comparable x86

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processor and that's best case but

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they're designed this way for a couple of reasons one a chip that's hard to

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code for ultimately gives russia more control over its own hardware two elbrus

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chips are expected to have lots of uses in government supercomputers to model

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things like weather and military applications uses that are more

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specialized meaning that mcst isn't as concerned about general performance mcst

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is also the only major company that makes elbrus motherboards and it looks

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like it'll remain this way for the foreseeable future meaning it's going to

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be very difficult to get your hands on an elbows chip if you live outside of

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russia inside the country the russian powers that be envisioned the chips

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becoming widespread in government medicine and education and although

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there are variants for plain old desktop pcs in these industries the big focus is

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on servers and enterprise level deployments and since they're not trying

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to really compete with AMD and Intel in the traditional sense russia looks like

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it will be fine with the process nodes being a little behind elbrus currently

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uses the 28 nanometer process with an 8

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core model costing around 1700 us dollars however they are looking at

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coming out with a 16 nanometer 16 core

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model in 2022 with a seven nanometer 32

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core chip two or three years after that now if you'll excuse me i'm suddenly in

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