Russia's sad past: from industry leader to nobody cares

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Looking around the world today, the CPU field has formed a "one superpower and many strong countries" system consisting of the United States, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the European Union. But if we look back at history, the Soviet Union should have been one of the most powerful countries in the world in microelectronics technology, and even once surpassed the United States.

However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's economic recession and political instability led to a large number of scientific research talents leaving the country for the United States. Among them, Intel ushered in a golden age of development thanks to Russian technical talents, thus becoming the leader in CPUs.

Overall, Russia's CPU research and development has gone through four eras: "glory", "turbulence", "difficult birth" and "decline". Today, although Russia is still fighting hard in the CPU field, the glorious days of the past are destined to be gone forever.

brilliant

In 1976, during the Cold War, Boris Babeyan was confined to the Soviet Union because he was tasked with developing a Soviet supercomputer. Therefore, he, who loved mountaineering, had to focus on tackling key technologies.

Just two years later, Babeyan led a team to develop the world's first superscalar computer, Elbrus-1, which was named after Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in the Soviet Union and Europe.

The main purpose of the Soviet Union's development of Elbrus-1 was to serve the military industry, such as the development of missile systems, nuclear weapons and space programs. Babeyan said that the superscalar processor used in Elbrus-1 would convert continuous symbols into parallel symbols to accelerate execution during operation.

This technology was not applied until 1993 on the PowerPC 601 developed by IBM. This means that Russia is 15 years ahead of the United States in this technology.

Even before the launch of Elbrus-1, Babeyan was awarded the "October Revolution Medal" for his outstanding computer-aided design work. After the launch of Elbrus-1, Babeyan continued to lead the design and development of the second-generation product.

Elbrus 2 CPU

In 1987, Elbrus-2 was successfully developed. It not only has a superscalar architecture, but also has new technology to support high-level programming languages. This computer has 10 processors and can perform 125 million operations per second.

In recognition of his great contribution to Elbrus-2 and its out-of-order superscalar architecture, Babeyan was awarded the "Order of Lenin" by the government that year, which was the highest honor in the Soviet Union at that time.

Despite his fame, Babeyan, who is now 54 years old, did not stop exploring and continued to lead the team to develop the third generation of Elbrus. He proposed to adopt a newer very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture, which uses a compiler to ensure that instructions are executed on different processors at the same time.

It is worth noting that when Babeyan began developing Elbrus3, the Soviet Union had also completed the design of the 32-bit El-90 microprocessor.

The project was led by Vladimir Pentkovsky, who worked under Babeyan in the Elbrus research group. He participated in the development of the Elbrus-1 and Elbrus-2 computers and led the development of the high-level programming language El-76.

In 1990, the prototype of the El-90 microprocessor was released. This structure reflects the design concept of combining RISC and Elbrus-2, thus having stronger compatibility.

turmoil

As the political and economic systems of the Soviet Union underwent drastic changes, the research funding for the Elbrus-3 project was suddenly cut off. After the grief, Babeyan founded MCST in 1992, focusing on the development of the VLIW architecture processor Elbrus 2000 (E2K).

Babeyan refused all the American companies that came to him, but he did accept the cooperation request from Scott McNealy, the founder of Sun Microsystems, because he had visited Babeyan in 1989 before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In 1992, MCST and Sun jointly established the SPARC Technology Center in Moscow to jointly develop processor architecture, operating system, compiler and multimedia library, which contributed to Sun's rapid rise in processors.

However, due to the political turmoil in the Soviet Union, Pentkovsky chose to immigrate to the United States. In 1993, Pentkovsky was promoted to Intel's chief CPU engineer by virtue of his strong strength and bringing many advanced technologies developed by the Elbrus team to Intel.

Vladimir Pentkovsky

Later, he began to lead the architecture development of Pentium IIl, with the focus on adding SSE instruction set and improving microarchitecture. However, several major features of Pentium III processor are almost the same as those of El-90 microprocessor.

These include: a superscalar architecture that can execute two instructions per clock cycle; support for two-way multiprocessing and debugging; branch-line inference, a high-performance pipeline floating-point unit, and ample cache memory.

In addition, in 1995, Intel launched the Pentium Pro microprocessor with a better structure, and the main new features were almost all the skills accumulated by Pentkovsky in the Soviet Union, including an improved x86 instruction decoder unit and superscalar architecture, speculative execution, and out-of-order execution.

Based on this, some people have speculated that Pentium was named after Pentkovski. In fact, after Pentkovski arrived in the United States, the Elbrus team had no idea what he was doing. It was not until 1999 that his name appeared in a technical publication.

On the issue of the source of technology, Babeyan also said that Intel's Pentium Pro microprocessor is very similar to the Russian superscalar architecture variant. "Intel was the first company to adopt superscalar architecture technology, and later ushered in its golden age and became the leader in the Western world."

Dystocia

In the mid-to-late 1990s, MCST faced many difficulties, including talent loss, funding shortages, and project stagnation. Fortunately, several core scientists stayed, allowing the project research and development to continue.

In response to this, Babeyan led his team to overcome difficulties and successfully developed the Elbrus 2000 processor E2K in 1999.

The CPU can execute Elbrus VLIW and Intel x86 code simultaneously, can execute 24 instructions per clock cycle, and can bring 10.2GFLOP/s computing performance with only 1.2GHz operating frequency.

This speed is three times that of the Itanium server chip that Intel was preparing to release at the time.

Although E2K made a sensation in the industry with its incredible ultra-high performance, ultra-small chip area and ultra-low power consumption, Russian investors were unwilling to invest in MCST due to the high risks in developing electronic equipment.

In order to solve the funding and financing problems, Babeyan registered Elbrus International in the Cayman Islands, and claimed that they would need 60 million US dollars and 3 years to complete the final design. If they only made a scaled-down version of the processor, it would cost 5 million to 10 million US dollars.

While looking for financial backers or customers, Babeyan also had MCST write programs for various American companies. However, he did not use the profits to expand the programming business, but invested in the development of processors.

Boris Babeyan

In Babeyan's view, processors are more valuable. "We understand the microprocessor market better than many Americans." Russian technology advocates applaud bold dreams and the possibility of breakthrough achievements in technology.

Later, Babeyan saw hope in Putin.

In June 2000, three months after taking office, Putin approved the "National Information Security Doctrine", proposing that key technologies to be developed include: high-performance computer technology, intelligent technology, and information attack and protection technology.

Russia's high profile attracted the attention of the West. At that time, Microprocessor Report, a well-known semiconductor magazine in California, USA, published a report called "The Russians Are Coming" which introduced in depth the various black technologies of the Elbrus 2000 processor.

decay

Faced with competition from Russia, American technology companies quickly took action. In 2002, Intel and HP jointly developed the Itanium 2 processor, code-named "McKinley".

Although he said Elbrus was better than McKinley, times had changed and Babeyan believed that "to be the best in the world, we must go global." So in 2004, when Elbrus 2000 was successfully launched, he decided to join Intel with the E2K team.

Babeyan served as director of architecture for the software and services division at Intel and head of microprocessor development at Intel's Moscow Research Center. He is also the second European to receive the title of Intel Fellow.

At the same time, Intel acquired MCST's superscalar processor-related intellectual property, further consolidating its position in the processor industry.

Since then, Russia's processor research and development has almost fallen into a slump. Driven by policies, MCST has launched a series of advanced versions of the Elbrus processor, but these processors have been "living off their old capital" and gradually falling behind the West.

It was not until 2012 that the Russian government began to vigorously support the microelectronics industry and formulated industrial development strategies such as the "Electronic Industry Development Plan 2013-2025" and the "Defense Industry Complex Development Plan". Among them, the total budget allocated for priority support sub-projects such as computer equipment reached 170 billion rubles.

Subsequently, the Russian government also made a lot of efforts in the microelectronics industry, including purchasing domestic electronic products as much as possible, developing civilian and military CPU lines, fully focusing on the three major architectures of Elbrus2000, SPARC, and MIPS, and developing the "Baikal" chip.

Based on this, in 2015 MCST launched the Elbrus-4C, which is said to be the most technologically advanced domestic processor in Russian history, comparable to Intel's i3 and i5 (released in 2009). The chip uses 65 nanometers, contains 4 cores, and operates at 800MHz.

Elbrus-16C processor

In October 2020, MCST announced its latest CPU, Elbrus-16C. This processor is built with the sixth-generation VLIW instruction set architecture, consists of 12 billion transistors, is designed with 16 cores, 2GHz frequency, and is manufactured using a 16-nanometer process.

Obviously, the most advanced processors that Russia can develop are already relatively backward. Babeyan, who is nearly 90 years old, has seen all this. Although he has not retired yet and has many projects planned to do, he will not come back.

Conclusion

The mainstream history of computer processor architecture nowadays claims that the core technology of CPU originated from the United States. But few people know that the core technology of Intel's early processors came more or less from engineers of the Soviet Elbrus supercomputer.

Keith Diefendorf, a Russian processor expert, once said, "Concepts such as superscalar architecture, shared memory multiprocessing technology, and EPIC technology were successfully developed in Elbrus long before they appeared in the West."

However, after its glory days, the reasons for the decline of Russian CPU technology may be more worth discussing. Among them, Russia neglected the civilian and commercial use of computer technology, as well as its political and economic instability and lagging industrial development.

In the current international situation, if we consider it from the perspective of national security: once Russia's processor technology is controlled by others, it will be in a very disadvantageous position in international competition and confrontation. Although there is still a certain "foundation", it is difficult for Russia to reverse this passive situation.

Source: Jiwei.com