Would you believe, a teaser ad might say, in a microprocessor that will allegedly outperform Intel's Itanium? That such a processor was being designed by Russian scientists held over from the Cold War? That the designers hadn't really been heard from since the late 1990's?

According to the company's own roadmap, that chip, dubbed "Elbrus", will likely achieve just 400-MHz on a 0.18-micron process, but a successor, the "E2K", could scale to 1.2-GHz by 2004 if everything goes as planned. In a 0.1-micron process it will have a clock frequency of 3 GHz and deliver scores of 500 and 1200 using the SPECint95and SPECfp95 benchmarks, respectively, the company claims.

While early cores were clones of Sun Microsystems' Sparc architecture, the company is branching out with its own instruction set. Elbrus says it has developed a "binary compliation" technology, similar to Transmeta's "code-morphing" technology, that will make it compatible with the X86 instruction set.

While that clock speed may seem slow, Elbrus' claim to fame is a hyperparallel architecture that apparently influenced the design of the Transmeta Crusoe chip, among others. By performing more operations in parallel, the argument goes, more work can be done through the use of a slower clock speed, thus consuming less power.

To read the full story, click here.

Elbrus MCST can be found here.

Source: ExtremTech

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