[jensnockert]

I doubt it is 25 operation super-scalar, it most likely is a 25-issue VLIW. Elbrus has been doing them for a long while[1].

I doubt it will be fast on translated code, but Transmeta could do x86-to-VLIW translation reasonably 10 years ago, so it isn't impossible. If they have similar software, it should be quite fast. Of course, the Crusoe and Efficeon are less wide (4 and 8 functional units iirc?) but I doubt x86 is the preferred instruction set for these, it is probably there to allow mixed-mode software (x86 OS + some native applications?)

Since it seems to be built for HPC, 3 cpu-to-cpu links, 4 DDR memory controllers, over 20MB of cache. This probably makes a bit of sense, you could run a regular x86 version of Linux for most applications and support binary driver blobs etc. But then compile certain computational software as native code.

The teams behind this processor probably have built HPC stuff since the seventies[2], I doubt they would gain anything by switching direction.

[1] http://www.realworldtech.com/elbrus/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_%28computer%29