Elbrus group of companies from Russia announced its new project, the E2K processor. The group is a specialist in SPARC technologies and the accumulates the experience of development of the supercomputers family under the Elbrus name. It is also a partner of Sun Microsystems.

The command system of the new processor is characterized by explicit parallelism at the operations level. This, along with a number of other proprietary solutions, allows to achieve the record-breaking performance of 5.4 billion integer operations per second (135 SPECInt) while operating at 1.2 GHz frequency. E2K is bit-compatible with Intel x86 family of processors and, according to Elbrus scientific director Boris Babayan, will also be compatible with the future Merced processor. The compatibility is provided by applying the mechanism of binary compilation.

Extensive tests conducted by Elbrus revealed that the new processor outperforms Merced by the factor of three in integer operations. As to floating-point operations, E2K is five times more productive than upcoming Intel product. E2K does not exist as a single chip yet, but Dr. Babayan says that the resulting product, after its implementation in silicon, is unlikely to differ significantly in performance from the experimental prototype.

By the moment, the logical design of the microprocessor is completed and the development is done up to the stage of executable Verilog description. According to Dr. Babayan, finishing the project will take about three years and US$ 30 to 40 million worth of investments. Currently Elbrus is looking for investor ready to compete with Intel in high-performance processors.

Source: InfoArt News Agency

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