News Russian chipmaker unveils Raspberry Pi competitor — despite US sanction woes, Elbrus packs its homegrown chip into the smallest form factor yet

[Admin]

The Elbrus-2S3 processor is being used to power a Raspberry Pi 5 competitor from Russian state agency Rostec. The problem? The Elbrus-2S3 hasn't been produced since 2022 when Taiwan sanctioned Russia.

Russian chipmaker unveils Raspberry Pi competitor — despite US sanction woes, Elbrus packs its homegrown chip into the smallest form factor yet : Read more

 

[peachpuff]

Did they buy this from alibaba and put their name on it?

 

[bit_user]

These Elbrus processors are probably the most interesting CPU I've heard of Russia's tech sector producing. I am curious to see how it might continue to evolve.

Here's an article about an older generation:

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

Did they buy this from alibaba and put their name on it?

You might be onto something, sort of. Given it's made on TSMC's 16 nm node, it would seem well within SMIC's capabilities to manufacture.

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

The Elbrus 2S3, the star of the show, is an alright SoC processor. A dual-core processor on TSMC's 16nm process, the 2S3 can run at up to 2 GHz, doing 196 Gflops. The chip supports up to two channels of DDR4-3200 RAM and PCIe 3.0 and contains a six-core graphics controller and built-in video encoding/decoding units.

What is an "alright" SoC btw ? Are you sure those specs are accurate ? This is what I got after after checking company's documents.

DDR4-2400, two channels of operational DDR4-2400 with ECC error correction code

96 GFLOPS.

2 cores MCST "Elbrus" for general purpose
1 core MCST "MGA" for 2D graphics accelerator, apart from having 6 cores for 3D graphics accelerator

 

[usertests]

Did they buy this from alibaba and put their name on it?

Elbrus is "legit". You can find articles about them on Tom's Hardware going back years.

This dual-core is of little interest to tinkerers. It's a "Raspberry Pi Competitor" to maybe RPi 2/3. 40 Watts seems like nonsense since they've done 8 cores at 70W on a 28nm node before. Maybe it's maximum system power consumption including drives, peripherals, etc.

 

[peachpuff]

Elbrus is "legit". You can find articles about them on Tom's Hardware going back years.

This dual-core is of little interest to tinkerers. It's a "Raspberry Pi Competitor" to maybe RPi 2/3. 40 Watts seems like nonsense since they've done 8 cores at 70W on a 28nm node before. Maybe it's maximum system power consumption including drives, peripherals, etc.

Russia is also known for constantly lying about pretty much everything so anything they announce has to be taken with a grain of salt.

 

[hotaru251]

my largest concern isnt performance its quality...iirc didnt a ton of their homegrown chips fail due to quality being very bad ?

 

[dalek1234]

Pretty much every good news that comes out of ruzzia is a lie. It's a waste of time to read, let alone write about it.

 

[bit_user]

my largest concern isnt performance its quality...iirc didnt a ton of their homegrown chips fail due to quality being very bad ?

Just curious: do you mean your concern as a prospective user, or what your concern would be as a hypothetical one?