The Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation has placed a bid to develop a 32-core processor based on the Elbrus VLIW-like architecture. The CPUs will be aimed at various applications, including servers, storage systems, and high-performance computing (HPC). The chip is set to be designed by the end of 2025 and will be made using 7nm or more advanced process technology.
Following various HPC-related restrictions that two U.S. administrations imposed on China in recent years, the development of high-performance server CPUs received major boosts in China, Europe, and Russia. China seems to have a multifaceted processor strategy that includes CPUs based on Arm, MIPS, RISC-V, x86, and even proprietary architectures. European companies mostly use Arm architecture, though they also have access to MIPS as well as RISC-V.
There are not many CPU designers in Russia, and the best known are Baikal Electronics, which uses Arm and MIPS for its client CPUs; KM211, which builds special-purpose CPUs, controllers, and FPGAs; and Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies (MCST), which designs CPUs based on its proprietary VLIW-like Elbrus architecture for CPUs aimed at HPC and mission-critical applications.
