Russian supercomputing will use self-developed CPU: 28nm 8-core ARM

Abandoning AMD/Intel: Russian supercomputing will use self-developed CPU: 28nm 8-core ARM

According to British media reports, Russia will develop its own high-performance supercomputing system RSK Tornado , instead of using AMD or Intel ‘s x86 processors, using ARM processors developed by local companies .

According to reports, this platform will be developed by the large system integrator RSC Group , which said that RSK Tornado can use two different processor architectures equally, switch from x86 to ARM is not affected, and work with the storage system developed in Russia, A rack can have 104 servers installed.

The core of this supercomputing is the ARM processor Elbrus series developed by a Russian company. Although the current report does not mention the details, it was reported two years ago. This is an ARM processor developed by the Russian MSCT company .

The Elbrus processor is the fourth generation of MCST 64 -bit ARM architecture, with a maximum of 8 cores, a frequency of 1.3GHz , equipped with 4MB L2 cache, 16MB L3 cache, 28nm process manufacturing, and floating-point performance of 250GFLOPS .

However , the performance of the Elbrus processor is a problem due to the long development time. The test results were announced before . It took 2 minutes and 52 seconds to run the rendering RyzenGraphic_27 model in Blender 2.8 3D .

In comparison, AMD ‘s Phenom II X4 965 processor took 2 minutes and 34 seconds to render the same test, which was a bit faster, while a processor like the Core i7-7700K only took 36 seconds to render , a performance gap of nearly 4- 5 times.

To put it simply, this processor has the performance level of x86 more than 10 years ago , and the 28nm process is relatively outdated. It is far from the current supercomputing chip in terms of energy efficiency, and the resulting supercomputing power consumption is also high. question.