Russia’s Elbrus CPUs have been tested in a range of gaming benchmarks, giving us a look at what Russian chipmakers can achieve with homegrown tech.
Elbrus 8-Core CPU From Russia Tested In A Range of Games, Barely Able To Deliver A Playable Framerate
The domestic Russian tech market has two major players in the CPU segment, these include Elbrus and Baikal. While Baikal has mostly focused on the server segment and more recently entered the consumer market, Elbrus seems to be taking a more clear approach to the consumer side of things.
The company has released its Elbrus 8SV 8-Core CPU which makes use of an aging 28nm process node and features a proprietary architecture that operates at 1.5 GHz which is a clock speed that’s nothing to flaunt about these days. It’s a marginal improvement over the Elbrus 8S which featured a 1.3 GHz clock speed with the same 8 cores. The CPU carries 16 MB of L3 cache which is shared to all cores. With these clocks, the CPU delivers 576 GFLOPs FP32 and 288 GFLOPs FP64 performance.
The Elbrus 8SV CPUs support DDR4-2400 memory in a quad-channel layout. Once again, their server-centric nature of them enables ECC memory support & also supports the Elbrus OS 7.1 which is based on Linux 5.4. For this specific test, Russian TechTuber, Elbrus PC Play, used the Elbrus 8SV CPU with 32 GB of DDR4 memory and an AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics card.
A range of games such as Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, S.T.A.L.K.E.R Call of Pripyat, S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky, CSGO and a PUBG clone were run on the Elbrus chip. The CPU was unable to produce what we might consider a playable experience on each title. CSGO fluctuated between 10-30 FPS, Clear Sky barely managed 10 FPS, and Call of Pripyat also delivered anywhere between 10-20 FPS. Morrowind saw FPS vary between 30 and 200 FPS.
Russia’s Elbrus CPU was then put to the test in a few old emulation titles which ran slightly better but it looks like there are a few things to play here. First of all, the chip isn’t even low-end by today’s CPU standards. It’s very outdated in terms of design and technology. Secondly, it is not clear how well the chip is optimized within its OS and whether gaming is a focus at all. Based on the performance here, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Lastly, while AMD has good drivers for Linux, it is unknown how the Radeon RX 580 is being utilized here. This goes off to show how far behind Russia’s own chip tech is compared to the big names such as AMD and Intel.
MCST, the company behind the Elbrus CPUs, has stated that they have taped out a better chip, the Elbrus-16C, which utilizes a 16nm process node, 16 cores, and a faster clock speed of 2 GHz. This is a higher-end chip that also supports 8-channel memory and 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes with performance reaching 1500 GFLOPs FP32 and 750 GFLOPs FP64, marking a 2.6x increase over the Elbrus-8SV. It will be a vastly better chip but still be considered old compared to modern-day CPUs.
The main question is when we will get these chips as Taiwan has been restricted from producing chips rated at 25 MHz or higher for Russia since the chip ban on Russia. It looks like the existing Baikal and Elbrus CPUs are the only options Russians have for now. One option could’ve been to move to China for chip production but even Chinese National Security concerns have prompted a ban on exports to Russia.
The post Russia’s Elbrus-8SV 8-Core CPU Tested, Barely Able To Run Modern Games by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.
