[misterhtmlcss]

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.

[kick]

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.

[drivebycomment]

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.

[kick]

It's not "just" another VLIW architecture, and hearing that take almost assures me that you haven't looked into Elbrus.

[drivebycomment]

I have worked with MCST people (though at this point it's very long time ago). My view on Elbrus is that it's kept alive by politics, rather than technical merits.

The core challenge of the modern high-performance computing is the memory / cache latency - i.e. whichever architecture that can generate the most number of outstanding cache misses at all levels of cache hierarchy as quickly as possible will perform the best.

Between superscalar and SIMT (and lots of SIMD), VLIW has no design space left for high performance computing, as superscalar and SIMT are simply more flexible (superscalar is better for a single thread performance, and SIMT for highly parallel streaming workload). SIMD also didn't help, since it's available for both SIMT and superscalar - negating parts of the VLIW advantage.

Case in point: GPU is one area where the workload is better suited for VLIW. Yet, AMD moved away from VLIW as their new architectures are not VLIW. nVidia has been SIMT for a long time.

The niche VLIW still has some values is in DSP, where the overhead of extra die space for superscalar becomes significant, and the workload is predictable.

[gbuk2013]

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