not long ago we did an episode on a line of cpus that were not made by AMD or
Intel but rather by an AMD backed chinese joint venture just for the
chinese market but these aren't the only alternative desktop and server cpus out
there russia also got in on the fund some years back and it appears the
company behind it mcst in case you can't read cyrillic is once again producing a
lineup of cpus called elbrus so why are they doing this and how
exactly are they different from more traditional offerings to answer we
collaborated with our friend dr ian cuttress of anontec and we'd like to
give him a big thank you and a sloppy kiss for his help and after you've done
watching this video be sure to check out his personal youtube channel techtechpotato for lots of cool insights
into all things hardware so like china russia is interested in completely
controlling the silicon that goes into its processors they want to avoid
potential back doors from chips designed outside the country namely AMD and
Intel's and maybe even put in a few backdoors of their own the russian
government has put in orders for lots of albers chips and is even forcing some of
their own departments to use them but other than being russia controlled what
makes them distinct well probably the biggest thing is that they're designed
using a vliw or very long instruction
word architecture don't you just love how engineers name things anyways what
this means is that when you write a program for an elbrush chip you pack
several operations into one instruction meaning the way that CPU runs is more
parallel than your average x86 core
that's probably sitting on your desktop or laptop right now in fact AMD had some
mainstream graphics cards several generations ago that ran on a
vliw-like architecture since parallel processing is more efficient for
graphics operations which you can learn more about up here this does make an
lbrs CPU more difficult to code for especially as the hardware has a much
more difficult time deciding on its own what the most efficient order to execute
instructions in would be this is called out of order processing a key feature of
virtually all modern x86 cpus it also
means that general performance for something like just running an operating
system isn't as good as what you'd get on a modern x86 chip although lbrs can
run x86 base os's and programs through hardware translation you're only looking
at performance of about 80 of what you get with a comparable x86
processor and that's best case but
they're designed this way for a couple of reasons one a chip that's hard to
code for ultimately gives russia more control over its own hardware two elbrus
chips are expected to have lots of uses in government supercomputers to model
things like weather and military applications uses that are more
specialized meaning that mcst isn't as concerned about general performance mcst
is also the only major company that makes elbrus motherboards and it looks
like it'll remain this way for the foreseeable future meaning it's going to
be very difficult to get your hands on an elbows chip if you live outside of
russia inside the country the russian powers that be envisioned the chips
becoming widespread in government medicine and education and although
there are variants for plain old desktop pcs in these industries the big focus is
on servers and enterprise level deployments and since they're not trying
to really compete with AMD and Intel in the traditional sense russia looks like
it will be fine with the process nodes being a little behind elbrus currently
uses the 28 nanometer process with an 8
core model costing around 1700 us dollars however they are looking at
coming out with a 16 nanometer 16 core
model in 2022 with a seven nanometer 32
core chip two or three years after that now if you'll excuse me i'm suddenly in
the mood for a cold bowl of bush if you're a student a
professional or just someone who wants to understand the world better check out
brilliant the website that helps you reach your learning goals by working
just a little bit every day brilliant offers interactive explorations and a
mobile app to help you master concepts in math science and computer science the
courses take complex concepts and break them into bite-sized chunks over time
you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish we suggest checking out their
mathematical fundamentals course which has been redesigned with interactive
features to help you with the foundational concepts behind algebra
number theory and logic which make it a great resource for stem students the
first 200 people to head to brilliant.org techwiki will get 20 off
an annual subscription so go there now smartypants and become even smartier so
thanks for watching guys if you like this video give it a thumbs up hit subscribe like why not and hit us up in
the comment section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future