Elbrus 6K: Effort Redoubled

The fate of Elbrus processor, the long-anticipated and long-suffering brainchild of Roman Babayan, seemed to be on the brink of extinction after he left for a new job in Intel. However, the team he gathered is not going to give up. Since the industry had entered the multi-core era, with a redoubled effort they managed to create a dual-core Elbrus 6K that outperforms any analogs by at least two times.

See for yourself: a chip with 400 million transistors and 4MB L2 cache per 8GHz core processes 8 instructions per clock. However it consumes 160W of energy, so at maximum performance it requires a good dash of liquid nitrogen to cool down. Its 24-stage pipeline feature a dual-level prefetch mechanism: first it prefetches the prefetch and then the prefetch prefetches instructions from memory.

But! The key benefit of the new processor is simultaneous support for EM64T and AMD64: both SIMD/SSE2, VT and Nx Bit; and AMD Now!, AMD Live!, and Pacifica. The issue of socket compatibility was solved in a very original way: on the one side CPU features contact pads for LGA775, and on the other - pads for Socket AM2. At that Elbrus 6K has an integrated DDRII/III memory controller that disables when installed into an LGA775 socket.

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