Russian Company Unveils Homegrown PC Chips 268
Reader WheatGrass shares the news from Russia Insider that MCST, Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies, has begun taking orders for Russian-made computer chips, though at least one expert quoted warns that the technology lags five years behind that of western companies; that sounds about right, in that the chips are described as "comparable with Intel Corp’s Core i3 and Intel Core i5 processors." Also from the article: Besides the chips, MCST unveiled a new PC, the Elbrus ARM-401 which is powered by the Elbrus-4C chip and runs its own Linux-based Elbrus operating system. MCST said that other operating systems, including Microsoft’s Windows and other Linux distributions, can be installed on the Elbrus ARM-401. Finally, the company has built its own data center server rack, the Elbrus-4.4, which is powered by four Elbrus-4C microprocessors and supports up to 384GB of RAM.
about time (Score:5, Funny)
About time. We can't trust the Asian chips anymore.
At least the Ruskies have good security.
Re:about time (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't trust the Asian chips anymore.
These are fabricated in Taiwan. You had best keep using your abacus for a while longer.
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Re:about time (Score:5, Informative)
Russia does have fabs. The Mikron Group [wikipedia.org] made the Elbrus-2SM processor. They can't do less than a 90nm process yet.
Re:about time (Score:5, Funny)
Lev Andropov: It's stuck, yes?
Watts: Back off! You don't know the components!
Lev Andropov: [annoyed] Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!
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Geographically, the border between Europa and Asia is considered to be the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus Mountains.
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Asian? Might as well call it "Oriental" (Score:3)
About time. We can't trust the Asian chips anymore.
At least the Ruskies have good security.
What would make chips from this Asian country (Russia) inherently better than chips from another Asian country? And yes, given that nearly 1/3 of Asia is Russian territory it should be safe to call Russia an Asian country.
Geographically, it might be in Asia, but culturally, the majority of people aren't. And even if that weren't the case, what the hell does it mean Asian? Central Asian? Far East Asian? Siberian? Those three grossly oversimplified labels apply to Russia (and many other former USSR states for that matter.) Grossly oversimplified as they are, these stand for significantly different things.
And we are only discussing the Asian'ness of Russia, without even entering into the whole continent? Asian as in the Near
Fear of the West? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fear of the West? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fear of whoever. You don't try to guess the intentions of other countries. They can change. You figure out their capabilities and then have back up plans.
After Stuxnet and some of the other recent attacks around the world, I'd be a bit concerned about using foreign made technology in critical control systems. Who knows what's been inserted in the silicon.
Even without that, if I were the Russians and facing the uncertainty they are, I'd want to maintain the ability to make my own chips if things soured further with the west, (or the Chinese. Just because things are going reasonably well between Moscow and Beijing doesn't mean they always will be).
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Why go through all that effort reinventing the wheel? It would be much easier to invalidate foreign copyrights and simply pirate everything.
More likely it's for increased security and avoiding a single-supplier system, plus a bit of economic stimulus added in for good measure.
Re:Fear of the West? (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that a modern CPU is too difficult to manufacture. Copying the transistors in a CAD program is the easy part, building it with a usable yield is the hard part.
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I was answering why they don't just invalidate the patents and copy a modern CPU, and the answer is that the patents aren't the reason they're hard to copy. Intel (and others) don't patent their most critical secrets.
I completely agree they have the technology to build older designs, which is just fine. They can then decide whether the investment to upgrade is worth it to them or not.
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Yeah, and I build interstellar craft in Homeworld. Yeah - I still play that in a VM.
Re:Fear of the West? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because sometimes, the best way to learn how to make a wheel is to reinvent it. Copying is also good for learning, but if you really want to master the technology you have to build something from scratch.
And leave the WTO (Score:2)
It would be much easier to invalidate foreign copyrights
In order to do that, you would have to revoke the Berne Convention, and once you do that, you're kicked out of the World Trade Organization. A country that leaves the WTO would have a hard time exporting anything as WTO members enact punitive import duties against that country.
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Russia's 2012 WTO ascendancy required them to have already made, and continue to make, improvements in respecting intellectual property. I believe it took Russia 16 years of trade improvement to join the WTO. Taking an official policy supporting that kind of piracy would be very, very destructive in any term other than the short term.
-, .
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What about an unofficial policy? It's illegal, but the courts always find any case invalid on some tiny technicality?
Re:Fear of the West? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just one example of how the sanctions are nothing but good for Russia. Nobody in the West seems to get that. You can't make Russians suffer; they do that on their own.
Up is down; black is white, and Putin is brilliant. Russia will be a far stronger, richer, better country when he's done.
Richer? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Adventures in Ukraine? Oh - you're talking about the Brothers Cock. They saw a potential market, destabilized the government, and installed their own puppets. They didn't care how closely those puppets might be aligned with fascism or nazism, the Brothers Cock wanted their own puppets.
Russian adventurism? That's old history. The US continued that saga in Afghanistan, investing billions of dollars in subduing a people who just won't subdue.
Isn't adventurism a wonderful thing?
You know you really shouldn'
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Sorry, stupid, but you miss with that jab. There is not one bit of Russian in my genes. Well - possibly some undocumented marriage way back in the mists of time. Russians and Poles have been near neighbors for a long, long time. With a Slavic ancestry, I would be more inclined to side with Ukies, than with Russkies.
But, honesty trumps ancestry. This whole ball of feces was started by westerners, for the sake of profit.
You WILL note, please, that I have made zero attempt to defend Yanukovych. I have sa
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Whatever. Aren't you literate? I'm trying to make sense of the word that you've attempted to spell. Dilantin? Are you trying to tell us that it's time for your medications? That's it. Dilantin. Well, run along and remind your mother that you need your meds!
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With an economy 97% based on carbon energy when the rest of the world does something about climate change (and it's not that far off, it's already started with solar power becoming cheaper than coal power) Russia will be left high and dry in a economy worse than the 90's. This will be entirely Putin's fault because he's prioritized carbon based energy above everything else.
Like all things Russian this attempt at self production will fail because the corruption and governance problem (the true hallmark of Pu
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Hey, I'm an American and I'd like to have one of these Russian PCs for more or less the same reason! Sometimes it's nice to have a weird foreign architecture [schneier.com] around...
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There would be no lost margins. The home grown computers would be priced high enough to compensate for the higher costs of labor, regulation, licensing, etc. The only loss would be competitiveness on the GLOBAL market. Those computers would sell here in the states, where Chinese and/or Asian computers were no longer available. They might export as well to other western nations that may have been cut off from Asian supply at the same time that the US was cut off.
Yes, if China or Asia were to stop exporti
things getting harder for NSA, which is good (Score:4, Insightful)
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I wasn't expecting a paranoia induced non-sequitur from a kernel maintainer, but here we are.
Certainly, your source code is public, and I could read every line of it. I have maintained that I could, if I wanted to, read and lean and understand and trust every NSA contribution to cryptography. Many disagreed, that I might need some sort of education in maths or something.
My position is now, I don't want to. I don't care what happens to an infiltrated Russian chip maker. I do care what happens to Intel an
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Back in the day we had systems with dual processors running half a clock apart. If one CPU ran into certain types of problem the other could be stopped before it hit them and a jump to some handler code made. It seems like we could do with something similar now where the operation of two different CPUs could be compared to see if one is acting suspiciously.
Unfortunately it's probably impossible with complex CPUs that have big caches and OoO execution etc.
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Yes, no, maybe?
Russian surveillance of the general population would be predicated on Russian software running on Russian hardware, within Russian networks. Take that Russian hardware, install Linux on it, and run it in western networks, and you've probably made things harder on BOTH Russian and western surveillance communities.
I'd be happy to experiment with this. Maybe I can get them to send me a free computer to play with, if I promise to send them my results?
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I would almost certainly prefer the FSB to see what I am doing rather than the NSA. The FSB aren't able to knock down my door and throw me in jail for thought crimes like the NSA can.
You, my friend, know nothing about the FSB [wikipedia.org].
The NSA can gather all your information and store it on a server for a set amount of time. The FSB can do this indefinitely, can imprison you without any justification, subject you to whatever torture they deem necessary, and can even outright kill you if they so wish. They are literally what came out of the ashes of the KGB. I'm not condoning the NSA's actions, but they are a far cry from the FSB by any definition.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:5 year lag pretty good (Score:5, Informative)
Sadly, their brags of "only five years behind" is an underestimate. It's a 65nm chip - its heyday was 2006-2007, on tail-end Pentium IVs, early Core 2, and Phenoms. 45nm hit in 2008, followed by 32nm in 2010. In 2012 Intel hit 22nm, but most others were on a 28nm half-node. Currently, 14nm is shipping from some vendors, and the rest are gearing up for it.
Account for the fact that these chips most likely won't actually be delivered until 2016, and you'll see they're really 10 years behind, not 5. That will probably still be fine for desktops or industrial use, but mobile is out, and servers will be very inefficient compared to modern ones.
Re:5 year lag pretty good (Score:5, Interesting)
You really don't need all that much CPU power to 'securely' push around data and that's is what will become the number focus for government, 'SECURELY' pushing around data. Any country that does not produce it own chips and tech components leaves itself a slave to those countries that do. A simple shut down code can be embedded anywhere in hardware and be virtually impossible to discover until activated. No country can be trusted with that kind of power over another country. One flick of the switch and all your infrastructure could be shut down, until all of the equipment controlling it has been replaced and this when all of the infrastructure needed to manage that replacement has been shut down. A completely manual process that would take weeks even months, with all digital communications shut down. With a population left to go hungry in the dark with the communications infrastructure required to manage food handling from farm, to processing, to warehousing, to retailing and of course computers in vehicles. Of course defence forces will have insured their transport vehicles are free of digital control systems to ensure electronic durability with a lack of electronics, oh wait. Computers are handy but they are as vulnerable as hell. One ill time major solar flare and we have some pretty severe problems, much like a now opposed country hitting the off switch (the country in the world least to be trusted, should be pretty bloody obvious to everyone by now, USA, USA, USA, well done - not).
Re:5 year lag pretty good (Score:5, Insightful)
...these chips most likely won't actually be delivered until 2016...
I don't see why there would be such a delay when the article says:
The company finalized development of Elbrus-4C in April 2014, and began mass production last fall.
As for the "five years behind comment" (which was not anyone bragging but instead criticising), I suspect that the article mashed together two different quotes into one. In terms of performance (which put them between the i3 & i5), they are five years behind mainstream performance. But it is difficult to compare this and the other performance metrics because of the architectural differences. This isn't a x86 CPU, it is more of a hybrid design. It runs at a very low clock speed (800MHz) and it's power requirements (45W) are low for a 65nm process.
It's not really the important part of the story though. For some countries affected by US export restrictions, having an alternate supplier makes them better than nothing. This CPU will not make the company a household name in the West, but they will continue to have a market in the places that the big boys can't play.
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Manufacturing process is decidedly not everything.
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I can make a car out of bits found out behind my shed, doesnt mean I am competing with anyone
In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Funny)
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65nm?! (Score:2)
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Hm. 10 years you say?
About time for vanilla WoW to hit Russia in a big way.
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Yeah, yeah, I know that's primarily GPU, but the idea that somehow a C2D is a crippled chip is absurd. This thing is fine for pretty much everything I throw at it. The biggest bottlenecks it has right now are the 4GB RAM on the motherboard and the USB2-based wireless adapter- the CPU basically doesn't hold it back at all. The only thing t
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Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz here, my only limitations are 8GB RAM and a slow mechanical HDD - otherwise I don't have any problems.
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Russian chips? Great (Score:2)
If they can't, oh well.
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Apparently it's exceedingly expensive (Score:2)
https://meduza.io/en/lion/2015... [meduza.io]
According to this site, it costs $4,000.
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$4000 is for a very early complete unit. It's really more of a developers kit at this point. The article you cite says the price will fall substantially when mass production begins.
So $4000 gives you early access to what they doubtless hope will be a big market when they start selling real units. If you want your code running on the boxes when they hit the market, that's just an ordinary business expense.
A cynic might conclude... (Score:2)
...that the chip's hard-wired back door leads to an agency using Cyrillic letters for its initials rather than English ones.
Canada too (Score:4, Funny)
We've started developing our own processors too, but since they're made of wood they tend to ignite past 400MHz.
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I still have a few tubes of old 6100 processors. They're novel in that they have a 12 bit architecture and run the PDP-8 Instruction Set.
And they're implemented in static CMOS. So you can clock them at 1 Hz if you like, Properly implemented you can experience the old 'blinking lights' minicomputer with your homebuilt machine.
Security for other HW components? (Score:2)
Confusion of names (Score:2)
Re:only i3/i5 (Score:5, Insightful)
I would, i'd like my spying more diversified rather than having everything i do tracked by a single agency.
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I would, i'd like my spying more diversified rather than having everything i do tracked by a single agency.
Does that mean you'll stop using facebook as well then?
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Most (sane) people have already. I think still using Facebook tells a lot about you, none of it positive.
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Most (sane) people have already. I think still using Facebook tells a lot about you, none of it positive.
Yeah, it says you share pictures of your vacations with friends and family. What idiot would do that?
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Sharing is double-good!
That should be doubleplusgood, Citizen. Your lack of zeal in learning the appropriate forms of Newspeak have been duly noted here at the Miniluv. You will be contacted.
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Re: only i3/i5 (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see that math isn't your strong suit. Five bits of data listed, and you only see four.
The more important thing is, you do not value your privacy. Other people do. It is no one's business who I saw on vacation. I may have met a KGB agent, or I may have met my mistress, or I may have talked to a "spiritual advisor", or I may have just basked in the solitude of the wilderness. And - it's no one's business.
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I can see that math isn't your strong suit. Five bits of data listed, and you only see four.
The more important thing is, you do not value your privacy. Other people do. It is no one's business who I saw on vacation. I may have met a KGB agent, or I may have met my mistress, or I may have talked to a "spiritual advisor", or I may have just basked in the solitude of the wilderness. And - it's no one's business.
It's not a question of "valuing your privacy" so much as "who gives a fart?" Stuff you want private you don't share. 3 people can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead.
Or just don't do anything you would want your kids to read on the front page of the New York Times, which is always good advice to follow.
The alternative is to do the same thing as the protagonist in John Varley's "Press ENTER . . ." You'll have your privacy, but you'll pay too much of a price.
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Wow. I owe you. 'Press ENTER' by John Varley. I read this story many moons ago. I was impressed with it. Loved it, in fact. I remember the story. I've looked for it. I couldn't remember the title for certain, and entirely forgot the author's name. I've gone so far as to tell the story in a much abbreviated fashion to other Sci-Fi readers - and they couldn't name the story or the author.
When you named it, I went looking for it. Not available on Kindle, or anyplace else I checked - not in electronic
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Tough shit. It is not my duty to inform government on my activities. If government believes that I might be meeting with a KGB agent, then government can get a damned warrant, and begin tracking me. Government may not have a blanket warrant to place every citizen under constant surveillance, 24/7 for the rest of eternity.
Only if, and only when, I have engaged in some suspicious activity which has caught the attention of a government agent should government gain any prerogatives regarding surveillance.
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I would, I'd like my spying more diversified rather than having everything i do tracked by a single agency.
There's a Russian Facebook, its called VK.com [vk.com]. I would speculate that the spying is on-par with Facebook.
As for end-user features, one of their differentiators is that there's also a music sharing feature where you can share your music with, basically every other VK.com user - not very popular with record labels, I'm sure.
Does that mean you'll stop beating your wife? (Score:2)
Does that mean you'll stop using facebook as well then?
No, because I never started in the first place, thank God. Facebook wasn't even around when I graduated from college.
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plenty of people..
but comparable how? speed?(unlikely?)
it runs the same software? more likely.
why would you build a datacenter out of them though? to get arond hw backdoors and import restrictions? sounds like the only reason. then again, if they're getting fabbed in taiwan the backdoor reason goes out of the door.
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Indeed. 5 years are not much these days, as CPU advances have massively slowed down in the last 10 years or so. These will be perfectly fine for most applications. They might be not competitive on price, but when you want to avoid NSA backdoors in your CPUs (and at least Intel decidedly has them), making them yourself or in a trusted venue is the only option.
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Hey, I like my AMD A8 laptop. Paid $305 for it 3 years ago. 17.3" of quad core HeaP glory.
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In terms of raw performance ability, AMD still lags a good bit. In terms of performance per $$$ AMD still isn't a bad value.
IMHO for standard consumer and business desktops AMD is still plenty fine. The servers, high-end workstations, and gaming market is where they have issues. They just have no high-performance chips (at any price) to compete in those sectors.
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You don't need a high end chip for gaming though, it's mostly GPU-bound.
I beg to differ. Some very popular games are also very CPU-bound. GTA V, Kerbal Space Program, and Project CARS are three well known titles I can think of off the top of my head that run a lot worse on the Phenom II X6 1045 (2.7GHz hex-core which I overclocked to 3.5GHz) in my secondary gaming machine than on the i7-4970k (4GHz quad-core, not overclocked) in my main desktop. Both machines have SSDs, 32GB of RAM, and GeForce 970 graphics so the CPU is the only significant difference.
AI and physics simulat
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It's worth it to me, because I don't like Intel's past business practices. They have been shitheads worthy of comparison to Microsoft. How 'bout that unique identifier thing? Every time your computer connected to any network, anywhere in the world, the damned CPU offered a unique identifier, unless you knew to turn that identifier off. Anonymous tips to the police? Forget that. Whistleblower hotline? Yeah, sure. Anonymous submissions to an editorial page? That's out of the question. In each instan
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Every time your computer connected to any network, anywhere in the world, the damned CPU offered a unique identifier, unless you knew to turn that identifier off.
Just run Linux.
Re: Which architecture? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a mix : an arm 6 derived core with sparc 9 ISA with x86 emulation.
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Eh... Nope.
It is using the Elbrus architecture which is a variant of the EPIC* architecture (like that of the Intel/HP Itanium). This is a variant of the Elbrus 2000 design which was much hyped.
(* EPIC = explicit parallel instruction coding, more comparable with VLIW designs than CISC/RISC ones)
Re:Which architecture? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Which architecture? (Score:3)
Re: Which architecture? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Which architecture? (Score:4, Informative)
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VLIW/EPIC? The Russians should just buy up the Itanium from Intel, in return from a deal by Intel to build a fab in Russia where these could be fabbed. Would be a win-win for both.
But then the story headline is wrong - this is not a PC chip: it's a server, or at minimum, a UnixStation chip
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Well, Intel did establish an R&D center in Moscow based around (some of) the group that designed the Elbrus, and the lead designer Boris Babayan [intel.com] is an Intel Fellow. Buying up Itanium itself, though, wouldn't be much of a win, it's not that much better than Elbrus and Elbrus can natively run x86 code, which is a big win. Add to that the Russians control the IP, why give that up for Itanium? Particularly as the architecture has been used in their military computers for years.
Yes, it's a server/workstation
Re:How will this compete? (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I am browsing for the components to build a new computer, I am using a machine considerably more than five years old. Performance is acceptable in almost all cases. It is more than adequate for business purposes. The primary reason I am shopping for a new machine, is reliability. The individual components are all past their expected life expectancy. In short, I fully expect it to crash one day in the not-distant future, and never start up again.
Five year old technology would serve me fine, if I could find new components. And, that same technology would serve 90% of the business and home markets as well.
Specifically, I'm running the second incarnation of the Sledgehammer chip. One of the first dual core Opterons. This Opteron is an upgrade - the same motherboard hosted a first generation Sledgehammer before that.
Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 165 /0/4
product: Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 165
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD]
bus info: cpu@0
width: 64 bits
capabilities:
mathematical co-processor,
FPU exceptions reporting,
wp,
virtual mode extensions,
debugging extensions,
page size extensions,
time stamp counter,
model-specific registers,
4GB+ memory addressing (Physical Address Extension),
machine check exceptions,
compare and exchange 8-byte,
on-chip advanced programmable interrupt controller (APIC),
fast system calls,
memory type range registers,
page global enable,
machine check architecture,
conditional move instruction,
page attribute table,
36-bit page size extensions,
clflush,
multimedia extensions (MMX),
fast floating point save/restore,
streaming SIMD extensions (SSE),
streaming SIMD extensions (SSE2),
HyperThreading,
fast system calls,
no-execute bit (NX),
multimedia extensions (MMXExt),
fxsr_opt,
64bits extensions (x86-64),
multimedia extensions (3DNow!Ext),
multimedia extensions (3DNow!),
rep_good,
nopl,
pni,
lahf_lm,
cmp_legacy,
vmmcall
AMD was winning bang for buck, ARM outsells Intel (Score:3)
Intel was significantly ahead of everyone else. Then AMD provided better performance per dollar even at a larger process size by choosing a better design. Then Intel beat them again. Next, ARM was suddenly outselling both when performance- per-watt became the key yardstick. Things change in the CPU market.
Ten years from now, 64-core processors may be competing against 128-core processors and there's no guarantee that either Intel or ARM would have the best design. Mybe in ten years it'll be all about
see also Itanium vs amd64 (Score:2)
Consider also the transition to 64-bit. Intel developed the Itanium. AMD choose to extend i386 with amd64. Intel ended up losing big time - they had to give up on Itanium and start naking AMD-compatible chips. There's no reason to think they won't make a similar mistake again.
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Intel was significantly ahead of everyone else.
Was? They still are!
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No. They are catching up, but they are behind in almost all aspects of CPU design. The only thing that saves them is that they have better manufacturing processes and that many people are willing to pay insane prices for Intel.
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5 years is not much these days for CPUs. Since AMD does not threaten Intel enough anymore, not much has happened in the last 5 years.
Re:How will this compete? (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, they don't have to compete outside of Russia and other ITAR countries.
They only have to be more trustworthy than what can be imported, and "good enough" for the job at hand.
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Same here. And it will be interesting to see whether this gets MS another threat of a few billion in penalties from the EU anti-trust people. The last time it did not because the tablets were regarded as dedicated devices. A PC is not.
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Windows 10 makes the user-configuration toggle optional. On a PC, Microsoft allows manufacturers to choose whether or not a user can disable Secure Boot.
So just choose a manufacturer and model that lets you disable secure boot.
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seeing as America does not currently have a manned space program to speak of.
FTFY.
I won't get into the whole "manned versus unmanned" argument. But I'd point out we "didn't have a manned space program to speak of" from 1975 to 1981--six years. We've been buying rides from the Russians since 2011. SpaceX is expecting to have it's capsule ready for it's first manned mission in 2017, which will be six years from the last Shuttle launch.
Somehow we survived the six years between 1975 and 1981 as a country without a manned spaceflight program. I think we'll probably do it again betwee
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Isn't it about time to change this meme to... (Score:5, Funny)
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In Putin's Russia... ?
Putin is doing his best to make it one and the same again.
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Not really, no. Export of raw materials and foodstuff, no high tech, a strong orthodox church, a huge gap between rich and poor - this doesn't look like USSR at all. More like tsarist Russia.