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Russian-Made Elbrus CPUs Fail Trials, 'A Completely Unacceptable Platform'

AuthorizedCust 5y ago
Sputnik V vaccine, Buran shuttle, USSR itself, I could go on. Will Russia ever shed its reputation of being a perpetual “me, too” with poor execution? Is the world better off without Russia overcoming it?
- rbanffy 5y ago
  For the record, Buran was a lot better than the Shuttle and, probably, cheaper to operate as well. The shuttle was reusable, but it required so much refurbishment after a flight it never accomplished its goal of cheap access to orbit. Being unmanned, a Buran could stay in orbit for far longer than a Shuttle too.
  - AuthorizedCust 5y ago
    It was theoretically better in selected aspects, but do we really know given how little it flew? The USSR knockoff of the Concorde was also superior on paper in certain aspects, but firsthand accounts of flying on it and its operational history clearly expose its inferiority to western technology.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      We can extrapolate from what we know. It wouldn't need engine refurbishment, which proved more costly than expected. It could operate in fully automated mode, which would allow longer stays in space. It also had ~30 tons of extra payload, which would offset some of the extra cost of the fully expendable Energia booster. Would it deliver on what Shuttle promised? No. Would it be more flexible? Yes. Would it be a good match for the other Soviet space gear? No. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, would it have evolved into a more usable vehicle? That we'll never know.
guenthert 5y ago
Uh, no mention of SPECTRE? I'd thought that would matter in a banking application; more than the difference in TPS even.
codedokode 5y ago
If you read the article, you'll see that the difference in performance is not that huge: > SPEC CPU 2017 2.62 (base) ~ 3.15 (peak) times slower > PGbench/PostreSQL 1.7 (read only profile) ~ 3.3 (read write profile) times lower So, Elbrus is just 2-3 times slower in these tasks than powerful Intel's CPUs that took millions of dollars to design. As Elbrus has lower clock frequency and larger process node, so this is expected. It is difficult to outperform a CPU that has smaller transistors and more of them; you need either to have more transistors or they have to be smaller; or both. But Elbrus loses a lot in Java tests: > Java 23 ~ 26 times higher response time I guess this could be because Java JIT doesn't support Elbrus architecture.
codedokode 5y ago
> Therefore, by the time the ambitious 32-core Elbruses arrive, chips from AMD and Intel will be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient in terms of performance-per-watt than they are today. I think that is wrong assumption because CPUs nowadays don't become "orders of magnitude faster" in several years.
ab_testing 5y ago
I dont know how long they have been in development, but if it is their first attempt, then I would say that they are doing pretty good. The chips that these are being compared against chips that have 40 years of development dollars poured into them. May be if they keep at it, then in a xouple of years it will come out competitive.
d0mine 5y ago
It looks like kickbacks for buying Elbrus are not as great as for Xeons.
johnklos 5y ago
I think this article slightly misses the point. If the architecture was actually failing - that is, if it were dumping core when running regular workloads, or crashing, or corrupting data - that would be a real reason to not use it. But it seems like it's simply slower than they'd like, plus there are features they want (better casing, better LEDs, remote management). These don't have much to do with actually running code. Speed isn't everything. We don't put supercomputers in to space - we put slow but extremely reliable processors in to space. Slow and reliable is much, much more important to space and financial (non-trading) applications than fast and not-as-reliable.
- quantified 5y ago
  Performance was not described consistently across processors or workloads. How many “FP64 GFLOPS” for the Xeon? Did they mean transactions per second per dollar? Optimizing JIT occurs on a software release schedule, not a hardware release schedule. See how fast the hardware catches up with AMD and Intel. Considering how much better it is than in 2019, pace of progress is pretty good. And we’ll have fresh hardware security bugs to find and exploit, more fun for all.

Sputnik V vaccine, Buran shuttle, USSR itself, I could go on. Will Russia ever shed its reputation of being a perpetual “me, too” with poor execution? Is the world better off without Russia overcoming it?

rbanffy 5y ago
For the record, Buran was a lot better than the Shuttle and, probably, cheaper to operate as well. The shuttle was reusable, but it required so much refurbishment after a flight it never accomplished its goal of cheap access to orbit. Being unmanned, a Buran could stay in orbit for far longer than a Shuttle too.
- AuthorizedCust 5y ago
  It was theoretically better in selected aspects, but do we really know given how little it flew? The USSR knockoff of the Concorde was also superior on paper in certain aspects, but firsthand accounts of flying on it and its operational history clearly expose its inferiority to western technology.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    We can extrapolate from what we know. It wouldn't need engine refurbishment, which proved more costly than expected. It could operate in fully automated mode, which would allow longer stays in space. It also had ~30 tons of extra payload, which would offset some of the extra cost of the fully expendable Energia booster. Would it deliver on what Shuttle promised? No. Would it be more flexible? Yes. Would it be a good match for the other Soviet space gear? No. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, would it have evolved into a more usable vehicle? That we'll never know.

guenthert 5y ago

Uh, no mention of SPECTRE? I'd thought that would matter in a banking application; more than the difference in TPS even.

codedokode 5y ago

If you read the article, you'll see that the difference in performance is not that huge: > SPEC CPU 2017 2.62 (base) ~ 3.15 (peak) times slower > PGbench/PostreSQL 1.7 (read only profile) ~ 3.3 (read write profile) times lower So, Elbrus is just 2-3 times slower in these tasks than powerful Intel's CPUs that took millions of dollars to design. As Elbrus has lower clock frequency and larger process node, so this is expected. It is difficult to outperform a CPU that has smaller transistors and more of them; you need either to have more transistors or they have to be smaller; or both. But Elbrus loses a lot in Java tests: > Java 23 ~ 26 times higher response time I guess this could be because Java JIT doesn't support Elbrus architecture.

codedokode 5y ago

> Therefore, by the time the ambitious 32-core Elbruses arrive, chips from AMD and Intel will be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient in terms of performance-per-watt than they are today. I think that is wrong assumption because CPUs nowadays don't become "orders of magnitude faster" in several years.

ab_testing 5y ago

I dont know how long they have been in development, but if it is their first attempt, then I would say that they are doing pretty good. The chips that these are being compared against chips that have 40 years of development dollars poured into them. May be if they keep at it, then in a xouple of years it will come out competitive.

d0mine 5y ago

It looks like kickbacks for buying Elbrus are not as great as for Xeons.

johnklos 5y ago

I think this article slightly misses the point. If the architecture was actually failing - that is, if it were dumping core when running regular workloads, or crashing, or corrupting data - that would be a real reason to not use it. But it seems like it's simply slower than they'd like, plus there are features they want (better casing, better LEDs, remote management). These don't have much to do with actually running code. Speed isn't everything. We don't put supercomputers in to space - we put slow but extremely reliable processors in to space. Slow and reliable is much, much more important to space and financial (non-trading) applications than fast and not-as-reliable.

quantified 5y ago
Performance was not described consistently across processors or workloads. How many “FP64 GFLOPS” for the Xeon? Did they mean transactions per second per dollar? Optimizing JIT occurs on a software release schedule, not a hardware release schedule. See how fast the hardware catches up with AMD and Intel. Considering how much better it is than in 2019, pace of progress is pretty good. And we’ll have fresh hardware security bugs to find and exploit, more fun for all.