Russia doesn’t have many homegrown processors – the Elbrus and Baikal are probably the two most popular chips in the country. While they may not be among the best CPUs out there, their importance has grown as major chipmakers AMD and Intel have stopped selling processors to the country. They’re also apparently capable of gaming, as we can see from a series of gaming benchmarks from a Russian YouTuber. They even used Russia’s own domestic operating system for the tests.
The Elbrus-8SV, a product of TSMC’s 28nm process node, comes with eight cores at 1.5 GHz. Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies (MCST) developed the Elbrus-8SV as a successor to the original Elbrus-8S, which had eight cores at 1.3 GHz. As a result, the Elbrus-8SV arrives with double the performance of the Elbrus-8S. The Elbrus-8SV provides 576 single-precision GFLOPs and 288 double-precision GFLOPs. In addition, the octa-core processor rocks 16 MB of L3 cache shared between each core, contributing to 2 MB per core.
By default, the Elbrus-8SV supports up to four channels of DDR4-2400 ECC memory with a memory throughput of 68.3 GBps. It’s a significant upgrade over the Elbrus-8S which embraced DDR3-1600 memory. The characteristics of the Elbrus-8SV may not sound impressive, but there are not many options in the Russian market.
YouTube channel Elbrus PC Play (opens in new tab) put the Elbrus-8SV to the test in some classic childhood titles such as STALKER: Call from Pripyat and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The reviewer combined the Elbrus-8SV processor with 32 GB of DDR4 ECC memory and an outdated Radeon RX 580. The test system ran on the Russian operating system Elbrus OS 7.1, based on Linux 5.4.
The Elbrus-8SV was running The dark mod pretty good, deliver frame rates between 30 FPS and 60 FPS at low settings. The chip had no problems with it The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, or. But again, the frame rates fluctuated between 30 FPS and 200 FPS depending on the complexity of the scenes.
STALKER: Call from Pripyat gave the Elbrus-8SV a hard time. At medium settings, the frame rates barely exceeded 30 FPS. They were between the 10 and 20 FPS range, with the occasional freeze during the test. The chip wasn’t very lucky with it STALKER: Clear sky. The reviewer observed similar performance and scenes where the Elbrus-8SV was 10 FPS flat. Elbrus PC Play also tested a few less popular titles, and performance was mixed.
The results speak for themselves. The Elbrus-8SV is far from a gaming powerhouse. Some of the titles tested were more than ten years old. Then there’s the matter of compatibility. Unfortunately, the Russian chip isn’t on the compatibility list for many modern titles, so it’s relegated to running older games or console emulators.
MCST has already included the company’s new Elbrus-16C, a 16nm chip with 16 cores operating at 2 GHz. It also supports eight-channel memory and provides up to 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes. In addition, the 16-core chip will bring the single and double precision numbers to 1,500 GFLOPs and 750 GFLOPs, respectively. That is an improvement of 160% compared to the Elbrus-8SV. It will be fascinating to see how much higher gaming performance the Elbrus-16C will bring to the table. The only problem is who will manufacture the chips for Russia, as Taiwan has banned the export of processors running at 25 MHz or higher.