PC Elbrus. Myths and Reality
There are many myths around Elbrus. You can meet them in the comments to any post or article about Elbrus. The main categories of myths can be reduced to three questions:
1. Is Elbrus domestic? Domestic means safe?
2. What is the performance? How "modern" is a computer based on Elbrus.
3. How much does it cost?
Each question has two opposite answers. From "Chinese bought" to "all ours." From "my phone is faster" to "still a little bit and overtake Intel."
I would like to clarify where the ears of all these myths grow. By and large, the reason is the same: the MTsST company - their secrecy, silence and, in the worst traditions of Russian reality, a tendency to overstate and lightly tamper. In preparing this article, I was faced with the fact that all the information on news and iron resources revolves around the mean press releases of the ICST. It is very difficult to find new information “from above”. You have to dig, read between the lines and dig even deeper. The ICST itself does not respond to emails and orders. Find contacts on the site - try it!
Bravura speeches “five-year period in three days”, as well as stories about “catching up and overtaking”, come from the same place. It is enough to re-read the press releases for 2013-2015. Now we should have mass production of the latest computers based on Elbrus-16S. Do you see him? Me neither!
About tricks with technological processes of production it is possible to read in this article on Habré.
To get away from abstraction and debunk myths with something specific, we will take the AWP (Workstation) Elbrus-401. This computer is produced in small series. It even seems to be available for ordering on the site. Formally.
Specifications taken from the official site.
So, how domestic and safe was the computer?
The most domestic processor. Its architecture and resulting blocks are completely domestic development. It was calculated and emulated on the FPGA Stratix V. Most likely, on the Quartus software.
Plates are manufactured using STMiElectronics equipment. Well, they managed to buy lines before the sanctions and other political troubles. But still, this is the most domestic part of the workstation. Next is the KPI (analog of the south bridge of the motherboard). There is already worse in terms of development. This is clearly not said, but between the lines it reads that many blocks were bought, and not developed independently (Altera has this practice). They say in KPI-2 the situation is better. The production is also domestic (by the way, Micron is responsible for the production). Those. Computer heart domestic. But what next. Unsafe from the point of view of information leakage, hard drives are clearly imported. Both. It is unclear how this fits into the concept, but perhaps they have been checked many times. With the video system, too, not everything is clean. If you can still doubt the 2D accelerator, then the 3D accelerator is the AMD 6000 Series. By the way, a funny wording. In the New Year’s video, the Doom3 game is played on a 6970 graphics card. Is it included in the kit, or was it specially set for recording the test?
How much Russian microcircuits and elements are in the motherboard on a bundle, given that, for example, RJ45 connectors are not manufactured in Russia, is an open question.
I believe that given the fact that the motherboard and processor are the main thing in modern computers, the Elbrus-401 AWP is a domestic product. Almost completely, albeit produced using “imported technologies”. Security is in question. There are definitely no bookmarks in the processor, what is wrong with the hard drives?
Again, two poles of opinions. Representatives of one pole point at the processor frequency with a finger, the opposite pole points to the gigaflops digits. The second is actively supported by the ICST, because this gives rise to press releases saying: “Look, we’ll already hoo, and then we’ll increase the number of cores, add frequency and then uhhhh !!!” Because if you look at gigaflops, now the Elbrus 4C processor is at the level of powerful Intel. 25 gigaflops, this is cooler than the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz, which has 19.2 gigaflops.
Frequency fans can be told that with the improvement of the process technology and the transition to the “honest” 28 nm, which ever happens, the frequency will rise (not last year, as ICST promised, but I still believe that there is a line, I have to do it, though, by indirect signs, and there are enough problems). They promise up to 1.3 GHz in the next generation. But this is not the point.
Gigaflops fans should first read in the publication “How and Why to Measure FLOAPS” .
The first caveat: which gigaflops are given? Theoretical, on the LINPACK test? No information.
Second. There is a little trick: if you look at the architecture, we will see that there is a DSP processor in the kernel. The characteristics of the previous version of the processor clearly indicated that the total performance consists of the Gigaflops of the main core plus the DSP core. For example, you can compare the Descriptions on the MTsST Monocub website based on the Elbrus-2C + processor and the processor itself .
But in real everyday applications from the DSP processor is of little use. They will be good at signal processing and encryption.
Here we are again confronted with the problem of closure. If anyone has an AWP, he does not conduct tests, or he does not upload the results.
But back to the main issue, performance in real applications and everyday work. The only tests I managed to find on this topic are with Cnews. Tests and their results can be viewed here .
Who is too lazy to go, the essence is this. It takes Intel Core i7-2600 (3.4 GHz) and Elbrus-4C. I was interested in the following.
It turns out that the only "real" tests with the 7z archive show that AWP is seriously losing. Not as it should be for Gigaflops, only twice, but 5.5 times for compression and almost 4 times for unpacking (I counted according to MIPS, because the memory is different). By the way, the conclusions and attempts to “pull the owl on the globe” will be amusing. It seems that the resource was given Elbrus with the condition of writing a positive review.
Lyrical digression:Here is the mentioned video about Doom3. Guys, why not show the screen with the number of FPS? This is logical and begs. This could be a base for comparison.
Another important issue. And slippery. Suppose this AWP began to be sold freely in all stores in the city. At an adequate price. Most of the users will not work with Linux based Elbrus OS, but will install foreign Windows, with which the Elbrus processor works in emulation mode. At the same time, performance losses are predicted to be at the level of 20-30 percent (in this place I will again whisper in the corner “tests, let me test it”).
It turns out that in an office application, if you put aside the capabilities of DSP processors and take away 25 percent of the performance, you get about 10 gigaflops, this is a AMD Athlon 64 level PC of 2.211 GHz (2003).
On the one hand, this is a lot. Normal office car. Especially when you consider the SSD and the amount of memory. On the other hand, we are still very far from "overtaking the Americans."
Another item covered in darkness. This myth could not be refuted in any way. There are "announced" prices in the region of 4000 dollars. There is information about 120,000 rubles. All this information as of May 2015.
It turns out in the best traditions of the Soviet Union: there is a car, there is a price, you can’t buy it. The MCST company did not answer me with two requests. Judging by the comments on the articles, not just me. Moreover, it is interesting how the price of a domestic computer changes, taking into account the current rate of the domestic ruble. The question remains open.
The lastreason why this entire post was written was besides the hope of an invite . Giktaymovtsy! Khabrovites! If someone has an arm of Elbrus-401 lying at hand, drive real tests on it. Show us! It’s curious.
1. Is Elbrus domestic? Domestic means safe?
2. What is the performance? How "modern" is a computer based on Elbrus.
3. How much does it cost?
Each question has two opposite answers. From "Chinese bought" to "all ours." From "my phone is faster" to "still a little bit and overtake Intel."
I would like to clarify where the ears of all these myths grow. By and large, the reason is the same: the MTsST company - their secrecy, silence and, in the worst traditions of Russian reality, a tendency to overstate and lightly tamper. In preparing this article, I was faced with the fact that all the information on news and iron resources revolves around the mean press releases of the ICST. It is very difficult to find new information “from above”. You have to dig, read between the lines and dig even deeper. The ICST itself does not respond to emails and orders. Find contacts on the site - try it!
Bravura speeches “five-year period in three days”, as well as stories about “catching up and overtaking”, come from the same place. It is enough to re-read the press releases for 2013-2015. Now we should have mass production of the latest computers based on Elbrus-16S. Do you see him? Me neither!
About tricks with technological processes of production it is possible to read in this article on Habré.
To get away from abstraction and debunk myths with something specific, we will take the AWP (Workstation) Elbrus-401. This computer is produced in small series. It even seems to be available for ordering on the site. Formally.
Specifications taken from the official site.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Microprocessor | Elbrus-4C (1891VM8YA) |
| Number of processors | 1 |
| Operating processor frequency, MHz | 800 |
| Peak Performance, Gflops | fifty |
| RAM, GB | 24 (up to 96), support for error correction (ECC) |
| Video subsystem | Integrated video card based on VLSI Silicon Motion SM718 Supports 2D acceleration, video scaling 16 MB of video memory, connection to PCI bus VGA, DVI output Resolution up to 1920 x 1080 3D video card AMD Radeon 6000 series, connection to PCI Express bus |
| Disk subsystem | SATA 2.0 hard drive 1000 GB, 3.5 "(up to 2 drives) CompactFlash card slot on the mSATA card drive on the 120 GB card |
| Integrated drive | DVD-RW drive. Dual layer disc support |
| Network interfaces | Support for data transfer speeds of 10/100/1000 Mbps |
| Sound | Integrated Sound Card AC-97 (stereo) |
| Input / output ports | USB 2.0: 4 connectors on the rear panel, 2 connectors on the front panel. 2 internal ports on the motherboard 1 Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000 Mb / s) connector 1 DVI + VGA (combined) output. It is possible to connect two monitors through an adapter (included) 1 RS-232 port external, 1 RS-232 port internal connectors for audio (input / output, stereo) |
Origin
So, how domestic and safe was the computer?
The most domestic processor. Its architecture and resulting blocks are completely domestic development. It was calculated and emulated on the FPGA Stratix V. Most likely, on the Quartus software.
Now one EP2S180 chip costs about $ 8K. So the cost of only FPGA chips in the prototype exceeds $ 50K.
For prototyping the Elbrus-4C + processor, 21 Altera Stratix IV EP4SE820 microcircuits with a total volume of 100 million valves were required (although the MCST itself gives a figure of 750 million) and costs about $ 200K. At the same time, the working frequency of the prototype is 9 MHz.
From here .
Plates are manufactured using STMiElectronics equipment. Well, they managed to buy lines before the sanctions and other political troubles. But still, this is the most domestic part of the workstation. Next is the KPI (analog of the south bridge of the motherboard). There is already worse in terms of development. This is clearly not said, but between the lines it reads that many blocks were bought, and not developed independently (Altera has this practice). They say in KPI-2 the situation is better. The production is also domestic (by the way, Micron is responsible for the production). Those. Computer heart domestic. But what next. Unsafe from the point of view of information leakage, hard drives are clearly imported. Both. It is unclear how this fits into the concept, but perhaps they have been checked many times. With the video system, too, not everything is clean. If you can still doubt the 2D accelerator, then the 3D accelerator is the AMD 6000 Series. By the way, a funny wording. In the New Year’s video, the Doom3 game is played on a 6970 graphics card. Is it included in the kit, or was it specially set for recording the test?
How much Russian microcircuits and elements are in the motherboard on a bundle, given that, for example, RJ45 connectors are not manufactured in Russia, is an open question.
Total
I believe that given the fact that the motherboard and processor are the main thing in modern computers, the Elbrus-401 AWP is a domestic product. Almost completely, albeit produced using “imported technologies”. Security is in question. There are definitely no bookmarks in the processor, what is wrong with the hard drives?
Performance
Again, two poles of opinions. Representatives of one pole point at the processor frequency with a finger, the opposite pole points to the gigaflops digits. The second is actively supported by the ICST, because this gives rise to press releases saying: “Look, we’ll already hoo, and then we’ll increase the number of cores, add frequency and then uhhhh !!!” Because if you look at gigaflops, now the Elbrus 4C processor is at the level of powerful Intel. 25 gigaflops, this is cooler than the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz, which has 19.2 gigaflops.
Frequency fans can be told that with the improvement of the process technology and the transition to the “honest” 28 nm, which ever happens, the frequency will rise (not last year, as ICST promised, but I still believe that there is a line, I have to do it, though, by indirect signs, and there are enough problems). They promise up to 1.3 GHz in the next generation. But this is not the point.
Gigaflops fans should first read in the publication “How and Why to Measure FLOAPS” .
The first caveat: which gigaflops are given? Theoretical, on the LINPACK test? No information.
Second. There is a little trick: if you look at the architecture, we will see that there is a DSP processor in the kernel. The characteristics of the previous version of the processor clearly indicated that the total performance consists of the Gigaflops of the main core plus the DSP core. For example, you can compare the Descriptions on the MTsST Monocub website based on the Elbrus-2C + processor and the processor itself .
But in real everyday applications from the DSP processor is of little use. They will be good at signal processing and encryption.
Here we are again confronted with the problem of closure. If anyone has an AWP, he does not conduct tests, or he does not upload the results.
But back to the main issue, performance in real applications and everyday work. The only tests I managed to find on this topic are with Cnews. Tests and their results can be viewed here .
Who is too lazy to go, the essence is this. It takes Intel Core i7-2600 (3.4 GHz) and Elbrus-4C. I was interested in the following.
It turns out that the only "real" tests with the 7z archive show that AWP is seriously losing. Not as it should be for Gigaflops, only twice, but 5.5 times for compression and almost 4 times for unpacking (I counted according to MIPS, because the memory is different). By the way, the conclusions and attempts to “pull the owl on the globe” will be amusing. It seems that the resource was given Elbrus with the condition of writing a positive review.
Lyrical digression:Here is the mentioned video about Doom3. Guys, why not show the screen with the number of FPS? This is logical and begs. This could be a base for comparison.
Another important issue. And slippery. Suppose this AWP began to be sold freely in all stores in the city. At an adequate price. Most of the users will not work with Linux based Elbrus OS, but will install foreign Windows, with which the Elbrus processor works in emulation mode. At the same time, performance losses are predicted to be at the level of 20-30 percent (in this place I will again whisper in the corner “tests, let me test it”).
It turns out that in an office application, if you put aside the capabilities of DSP processors and take away 25 percent of the performance, you get about 10 gigaflops, this is a AMD Athlon 64 level PC of 2.211 GHz (2003).
On the one hand, this is a lot. Normal office car. Especially when you consider the SSD and the amount of memory. On the other hand, we are still very far from "overtaking the Americans."
Price
Another item covered in darkness. This myth could not be refuted in any way. There are "announced" prices in the region of 4000 dollars. There is information about 120,000 rubles. All this information as of May 2015.
It turns out in the best traditions of the Soviet Union: there is a car, there is a price, you can’t buy it. The MCST company did not answer me with two requests. Judging by the comments on the articles, not just me. Moreover, it is interesting how the price of a domestic computer changes, taking into account the current rate of the domestic ruble. The question remains open.
conclusions
- In Russia, a domestic computer appeared. Although it is not yet possible to buy it, it is, it is produced by the bulk of us. It is developed by us. This is an achievement to be proud of, but it is absolutely early to boast.
- The real performance of Elbrus workstation on Windows will be at the level of AMD Athlon 64 2.211 GHz (2003). This is a lot. For special applications with encryption, the performance will be clearly higher. So ARM has its own potential niche, and it is rather big.
- The PR, or the press service, or the marketing department of the ICST (if it exists) must be dismissed in its entirety. Or create.
The last