Russia’s Elbrus 8CB Microarchitecture: 8-Core VLIW on TSMC 28nm

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15823/russias-elbrus-8cb-microarchitecture-8core-vliw-on-tsmc-28nm

by zdw • 6 years ago

150 70 6 years ago

tester34• 6 years ago

It's great to see that countires are starting to become more and more technologically independent.

Losing dependency on Silicon Valley may be another step after becoming hardware independent, or even those efforts can run parallelly.

I think I'd want to see tech hubs like London or Hong Kong to have significant part of "giant corps" market

iagovar2• 6 years ago

You can't be independent when your only realistic fab is TSMC.

There are some fabs here in Europe, all of them are WAY behind TSMC, be it Infineon, STM or even Globalfoundries, if they are still running.

Designing hardware is nice, manufacturing it is the real problem.

vetinari2• 6 years ago

That's what sanctions are for.

It is always more convenient to use existing capacity at existing vendor (A), than develop a new capacity (B). This has also the effect, that the vendor A gets a bigger part of the pie and there's no money left for the development of the capacity for B.

So once you get the Huawei treatment, you have no choice and do B.

throw12346512342• 6 years ago

TSMC - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company?

arianvanp• 6 years ago

The biggest Fab factory company in the world is Dutch [0]. TSMC, Intel and friends are customers of theirs and use _their_ equipment and IP.

So the Intellectual property seems to be there? It's just that we don't have any actual factories in EU.

TSMC seems wholly dependent on Europe here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding

kick4• 6 years ago

This isn't new; this architecture goes back decades, and they've had hardware for ages. It's really cool, but it's not like it's just starting out.

dang• 6 years ago

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

It's great to see that countires are starting to become more and more technologically independent.

I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I like seeing a diversity of technologies. On the other hand, economic interdependence is one of the forces that prevents countries going to war.

rurban• 6 years ago

I find this wide addressing mode interesting

-m128
compile in 128-bit secure addressing mode with hardware access control to objects.
In this mode, a pointer to data and functions takes 128 bits. It contains the 64-bit address of the object, its size (no more than 4 GB) and the position of the pointer inside the object. The mode enhances program memory control during execution.

Like Intels unused bound checking additions, it checks the starting offset and the ending offset. But without the HW hash table.

larozin• 6 years ago

There was a video on YouTube (in russian) where lead developer from MCST confess that they were unable to use this technology in practice. The entire software stack should be ported to strictly eliminate any usage of pointer magic in every place. They poured years on this and only succeed on porting libc and few small base libraries.

dogma1138• 6 years ago

Some benchmarks (posted in the AnandTech comments).

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EntityFX/anybench/master/d...

https://github.com/EntityFX/anybench/tree/master/results

bufferoverflow• 6 years ago

Wow, quite pathetic results.

AlEinstein3• 6 years ago

The floating point results are suspiciously good compared to the rest of the results. I wonder if they have some good VLIW instructions for floating point or it’s just an error in the spreadsheet.

NovemberWhiskey• 6 years ago

The 28nm lithography half-node is almost ten years behind the state-of-the-art.

Apple, Intel, AMD all have commercially available products based on 7nm now.

BruceEel2• 6 years ago

So x86/64 support via BT, cool. But I couldn't readily find any (English language) docs describing the native instruction set, have you folks seen any?

LargoLasskhyfv3• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_2000

edit: jump from english to russki, scanning links, finding

https://www.realworldtech.com/elbrus/ (7 pages from 20 years ago, titled From Russia, With Skepticism )

AlEinstein3• 6 years ago

This doesn’t have any info about the instruction set.

AlEinstein3• 6 years ago

The google translation is not bad:

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

BruceEel2• 6 years ago

Indeed, thanks!

mobilio2• 6 years ago

This is less known fact, but few years (15+) ago Intel hire Elbrus design team: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/56406-intel-hires-elbrus...

"On Monday, Intel representatives confirmed reports in Russian-language newspapers that the American chip giant had hired approximately 500 engineers and related staff from the Elbrus Moscow Center of Sparc Technology, a state-sponsored design house in Russia. Some of the engineers will be hired away from Unipro, a related company. The new hires include Boris Babayan, Alexander Kim and Ivan Bolozov, said to be the architects of the E2K processor, a failed “Itanium-killer”."

And same happens in past too: https://www.theregister.com/Print/1999/06/07/intel_uses_russ...

But i couldn't get information more about this team.

jonplackett• 6 years ago

Do you think this was just to try and make it harder for them to compete by stealing their workforce?

misterhtmlcss2• 6 years ago

If it's not then it seems an excessive amount of engineers at one time even for Intel. The goal would seem to be to cull the whole team.

mobilio2• 6 years ago

Well here is one video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUNJ_tkq2hk

It's on Russian, but shows how underpowered CPU (on paper!) can play with no lags resource hungry game.

So let's back on Intel's issues. Almost 20+ years ago Intel have a huge project that failed. Itanium based on VLIW architecture. Then Intel start pushing P4 architecture (Netburst) to the maximum. I think that they're hit 3GHz barrier and there isn't path beyond that.

And then PentiumM was born (from Israeli team) and soon CD, C2D.

thodin4• 6 years ago

"Russian designer could have been inspiration for Pentium name " - it's actually a fake news, Pentkovsky joined Intel several years after start of Pentium R&D.

monocasa• 6 years ago

I've heard that Pentium was named Pentium really late into it's dev cycle once the trademark office told Intel that trademarking model numbers wasn't going to be kosher.

jdsully• 6 years ago

At most companies they choose the marketing name near final release not at the start of R&D.

noncoml• 6 years ago

8086 -> 286 -> 386 -> 486 -> (5)86

Where (5) is Pente https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CE%AD%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B...

amq• 6 years ago

Another benchmark comparison: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

skissane• 6 years ago

There seems to be very little technical details available on the E2K processor's instruction set. Although Linux has been ported to run native on it, the E2K Linux distribution and sources don't appear to be publicly available.

Some people suggest this is security-through-obscurity connected with E2K's use in Russian military systems. I wonder if that is true.

The other issue, from what I understand, is the only C compiler for E2K is proprietary [1] (it is using EDG frontend). There is no support for E2K in GCC or LLVM. This also means their port of Linux couldn't be upstreamed since it can't be compiled with GCC.

[1] https://lvee.org/en/abstracts/303

ltt481• 6 years ago

There's an article in Russian about porting V8 and Firefox's SpiderMonkey onto these processors: https://habr.com/ru/company/jugru/blog/419155/

You may gleam some architectural details from the article and the comments.

Symmetry5• 6 years ago

That was well worth the read. Looks like the pipeline isn't exposed, which is what I'd expect for a VLIW in this role. They've got a some support for speculative loads but it seems pretty small so I'm not surprised they're having trouble adapting to general purpose code.

Veedrac• 6 years ago

http://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/people/mike/elbrus/docs/elbrus_p...

misterhtmlcss2• 6 years ago

I'm surprised they aren't just going with ARM designed chips and moving to a Linux system. This would seem to give them scale, pricing, availability/compatibility and also if they support open source with financial contributions then a really strong level of application security out if the box.

State security is important, but corporate security is critical as a first line of defense, because without those big successful companies and their contributions in taxes, R&D and tech support the state loses flexibility and top talent. Then a state will lose ground in preservation of their independence.

gbuk20132• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal_CPU

kick4• 6 years ago

Elbrus is a more interesting architecture and presents many benefits over existing architectures; allowing it to be lost would be bad for both technical and political reasons.

drivebycomment2• 6 years ago

I don't know about political aspect, but I don't think Elbrus is interesting technically. Frankly it's just another dead-end VLIW architecture. VLIW just isn't interesting or even relevant for general purpose computing or even high performance computing. DSP market is the only niche where VLIW has found meaningful usage, and even there, the advantage is not huge by any means.

eqvinox• 6 years ago

Just from a "proliferation and evaluation of technology" point of view, I find it nice that VLIW is getting a bit of a refresh (as an application processor, as opposed to GPUs or DSPs.) It's been quite some time since the Itanic sunk, and compilers have evolved... even if it doesn't go far, this is a nice opportunity to evaluate how well this can do in 2020.

Symmetry5• 6 years ago

We had NVidia keeping Transmeta's lineage alive in their automotive SOCs until quite recently, but now they've switched over to Arm's latest it seems. Too bad, the combination of code-morphing and an exposed pipeline VLIW design seemed like it could have been a good one though scheduling around variable delay memory accesses remains a challenge.

kick4• 6 years ago

For those of you in Moscow, if you go to the Yandex Museum you can play with an Elbrus box. It's really neat! Pretty fast, and has an entire Linux environment running on it.

Symmetry5• 6 years ago

No surprise that it's got a large L1 instruction cache given that it's a VLIW. Those aren't known for small code sizes, though I wonder why we don't tend to see variable length VLIW architectures?

MintelIE• 6 years ago

Where can I get one of these? Sick of involuntarily being included in the Talpiot Program.

peter_d_sherman• 6 years ago

"All of the world’s major superpowers have a vested interest in building their own custom silicon processors. The vital ingredient to this allows the superpower to wean itself off of US-based processors, guarantee there are no supplemental backdoors, and if needed add their own."

Any major company that deals in anything Internet, Web or Cloud related -- also has a "vested interest in building their own custom silicon processors", for exactly this reason -- security.

Some have realized this (Apple, Google, etc.), and have the resources to do this.

Others have realized this and do not have the resources to do this (smaller companies).

Still others have not realized this yet (thinking that software virus protection will solve problems which are in hardware), and are still in the process of waking up.

Prediction: We're going to see a lot of new CPUs and CPU designs by many players in the next 20 years...

Russia’s Elbrus 8CB Microarchitecture: 8-Core VLIW on TSMC 28nm

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