Moscow has promised financial backing for Elbrus International’s E2k, the chip that has been dubbed the Russian Merced killer. The mayor of Moscow Yury Luzko has promised to support the manufacture of the chip that could now start shipping as early as next year. Russian online news service Computerra reports that Luzkov, the Moscow minister for science and technology and the chiefs of the Russian academy of sciences met with Elbrus representatives to discuss plans for developing the chip.
In an interview in February (CI No 3,603), E2K architect Dr Boris Babaian claimed that the chip could emulate both Intel x86 chips and its next generation IA-64 instruction set in silicon, while outperforming anything that Intel can offer. Typically, it would be three to five times faster than the first Intel IA-64 iteration.
Using a 0.18 micron process and a clock speed of 1.2GHz, the chip will run at 135 SPECint95 and 350 SPECfp95, Babaian said, and use only 126 mm square of silicon and 35 watts of power. The Microprocessor Report estimates that, using the same process, Merced would clock 800MHz and deliver 45 SPECint95 and 70 SPECfp95, on 300mm square of silicon and 60 watts of power. The key to the compatibility between the various architectures is binary compilation. The technique has been used before, notably by Digital Equipment Corp in its FZ32 emulation software, which runs Intel x86 programs on the Alpha chip. The Elbrus binary compiler will be built into the silicon.
However, Babaian estimated that he needed up to $60m in investment funds to bring the chip to market. Whether the economically-ravaged Moscow government will be able to match that kind of budget remains to be seen.
