First systems with Elbrus CPUs developed in Russia go on sale

Russian firm MCST has started selling PCs and servers equipped with ARM Elbrus 4c processors, CPUs designed in Russia. Work is already underway on successors to the Elbrus 4c CPUs.

The 65nm Elbrus 4c, which came on the market last year, contains four cores, each running at 800MHz. According to the manufacturer, the computing power is 50 gigaflops. The processor supports a proprietary instruction set based on sparc and so-called very long instruction word instructions. In addition to x86 emulation, the processor can also run custom versions of Linux based on Debian and Linux 2.6 kernel. In addition, according to The Register, the processor is sufficiently powerful to make Doom 3 playable, for example.

MCST has now announced two systems that include the Elbrus 4c: the Elbrus ARM-401 PC and the Server Elbrus 4.4. The PC version, a mini tower, offers four USB 2.0 connections, a PCI Express slot and Gigabit Ethernet. The operating system chosen is a Linux version that is also called Elbrus. The Server Elbrus 4.4 offers space for four Elbrus 4c processors. Four of these server boards fit in a 1U chassis. This system also has gigabit ethernet and a number of sata and pci-e connections.

The market for the Elbrus 4c seems to be limited to Russia for the time being. For example, the Russian government has announced that it would like to exchange Intel and AMD CPUs for ARM chips of its own making for fear of espionage. Work is already underway on a successor to the Elbrus 4c: the Elbrus 8c, which is made according to a 28nm process, should have eight cores that run at 1.3GHz. This processor should hit the market this year.