Russia would not have many homegrown processors — the Elbrus and Baikal are most likely the 2 hottest chips within the nation. Whereas they might not be among the many finest CPUs, their significance has grown now that main chipmakers AMD and Intel halted processor gross sales to the nation. They’re additionally apparently able to gaming, as we will see from a collection of gaming benchmarks from a Russian YouTuber. They even used Russia’s personal home working system for the exams.
The Elbrus-8SV, a product of TSMC’s 28nm course of node, comes with eight cores at 1.5 GHz. Moscow Heart of SPARC Applied sciences (MCST) developed the Elbrus-8SV to be the successor to the unique Elbrus-8S, which had eight cores at 1.3 GHz. Consequently, the Elbrus-8SV arrives with double the efficiency of the Elbrus-8S. The Elbrus-8SV provides 576 GFLOPs of single precision and 288 GFLOPs of double precision. As well as, the octa-core processor rocks 16 MB of L3 cache shared between every core, contributing to 2 MB per core.
By default, the Elbrus-8SV helps as much as 4 channels of DDR4-2400 ECC reminiscence with a reminiscence throughput of 68.3 GBps. It is a important improve over the Elbrus-8S that embraced DDR3-1600 reminiscence. The Elbrus-8SV’s attributes might not sound spectacular, however there aren’t many choices within the Russian market.
YouTube channel Elbrus PC Play (opens in new tab) put the Elbrus-8SV via its paces in some childhood basic titles, comparable to S.T.A.L.Ok.E.R.: Name of Pripyat and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The reviewer paired the Elbrus-8SV processor with 32 GB of DDR4 ECC reminiscence and an getting old Radeon RX 580. The check system was on Russia’s home Elbrus OS 7.1 working system, based mostly on Linux 5.4.
The Elbrus-8SV ran The Darkish Mod fairly effectively, delivering body charges between 30 FPS and 60 FPS at low settings. The chip had no issues with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, both. However, once more, the body charges oscillated between 30 FPS and 200 FPS, relying on the complexity of the scenes.
S.T.A.L.Ok.E.R.: Name of Pripyat gave the Elbrus-8SV a tough time. At medium settings, the body charges hardly surpassed 30 FPS. They had been between the ten and 20 FPS vary, with occasional freezes throughout the check. The chip did not have a lot luck with S.T.A.L.Ok.E.R.: Clear Sky. The reviewer noticed comparable efficiency and scenes the place the Elbrus-8SV was at 10 FPS flat. Elbrus PC Play additionally examined a couple of much less common titles, and the efficiency was a blended dangerous.
The outcomes communicate for themselves. The Elbrus-8SV is way from being a gaming powerhouse. A few of the examined titles had been over ten years previous. Then there’s the query of compatibility. Sadly, the Russian chip is not on the compatibility record for a lot of trendy titles, so it is relegated to working older video games or console emulators.
MCST has already taped out the corporate’s new Elbrus-16C, a 16nm chip that wields 16 cores working at 2 GHz. It will additionally help eight-channel reminiscence and provide as much as 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes. As well as, the 16-core chip will convey the only and double precision numbers as much as 1,500 GFLOPs and 750 GFLOPs, respectively. That is a 160% enchancment over the Elbrus-8SV. It will be fascinating to see how a lot increased gaming efficiency the Elbrus-16C will convey to the desk. The one drawback is who’ll fabricate the chips for Russia since Taiwan has banned the exports of processors that function at 25 MHz or increased.
