http://www.hi-tech.ournet.md/elbrus_e2k.htmlElbrus E2K SpeculationsThe promising microprocessor Elbrus E2K (Elbrus-2000) developed by a Russian company called Elbrus became well-known not so long ago, namely after the article "The Russians Are Coming" by Keith Diefendorff, which had been published in the February edition of the leading technical publication "Microprocessor Report". The main theses of the article sound as follows:
The mass media all over the world have reported about the development in Russia of a new processor, which will potentially surpass Merced due to its much more promising features. The interest and wild discussions on this matter in the Internet keep on growing. A great number of famous western microprocessor experts rank Elbrus E2K very high. According to them, the Russian microprocessor is a fount of exclusive ideas with great future. In the beginning of this year Elbrus finished the logical design of its processor and completed the system software. The exact model allowed them to get all the performance estimates. And now they are facing the final part of their work: the realization of all their ideas in silicon. The present article tells a bit about the Elbrus family history, about the Russian priorities among some architectural solutions widely utilized in today's microprocessors. You will probably agree with me that historical investigations may sometimes help to reveal the future… So, let's go. ElbrusThe history of the world computer science is connected with the name of Elbrus. This company was founded in Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computing Equipment, which team had been developing supercomputers for the Soviet Union's defense establishments for over 40 years. E2K processor embodies the developing ideas of the Russian supercomputer Elbrus-3 built in 1991. Today Elbrus-3 architecture is referred to EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). According to Boris A. Babaian, chief architect of Elbrus supercomputers, superscalar architecture was invented in Russia. To quote him as saying: "In 1978 we developed the world's first superscalar computer, Elbrus-1. At present all Western superscalar processors have just the same architecture. First Western superscalar processor appeared in 1992 while ours - in 1978. Moreover, our variant of superscalar is analogous to Pentium Pro introduced by Intel in 1995". The historical priority of Elbrus is confirmed in the States as well. According to the same article in Microprocessor Report by Keith Diefendorff, the developer of Motorola 88110 - one of the first western superscalar processors: "In 1978 almost 15 years ahead of Western superscalar processors, Elbrus implemented a two-issue out-of-order processor with register renaming and speculative execution". In 1991 Peter Rosenbladt, the Hewlett-Packard executive, was in Moscow visiting Elbrus (by this time it was Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computing Equipment) and received exhaustive documentation on Elbrus-3. A bit later it turned out that at the same time HP started a project together with Intel, which resulted into a joint development of EPIC-processor, aka Merced. Its architecture is very similar to that of Elbrus-3, and all the differences deal mostly with the simplifications introduced by Intel in their processor. As to Boris Babaian, Peter Rosenbladt offered partnership with HP. But Babaian made up its mind to join Sun (the first meeting with Sun administration had taken place in 1989). And so, in 1991 the contract with Sun was signed. According to Sun official reps, Elbrus took part in the development of UltraSPARC microprocessor, optimizing compilers, operating systems (including Solaris), Java tools, multimedia libraries. From the very beginning the E2K project was financed by Sun. And now it is fully independent, all intellectual resources belong to Elbrus and over 70 USA patents guarantee this property. Boris Babaian explained: "If we had kept on working with Sun a bit longer, everything could have belonged to it. Although 90% of the work had been done long before Sun appeared". Between 1992 and 1995 a famous microprocessor architect Dave Ditzel worked together with Elbrus in Sun. Boris Babaian tells: "And then Dave founded his own company - Transmeta, and started working on a new device very similar to our one. We still keep in touch with Ditzel. And he, on his part, also feels like being our partner". Unfortunately, there isn't much information about the future product from Transmeta yet. All we know is that it will be a VLIW/EPIC microprocessor with low power and x86 binary compatibility provided by object code dynamic translation. And not so long ago I found out that Elbrus developments have very much to do with the most widely spread universal microprocessors - x86 Intel family. PentiumRussian supercomputer know-hows are carried out in Pentium processors. Former Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computing Equipment employee Vladimir Pentkovski is Intel leading processor architect. Pentkovski carried to Intel huge experience and progressive technologies developed at the Institute where he had worked. According to microprocessor expert Keith Diefendorff, "Elbrus has developed computers based on superscalar, shared memory multiprocessing, and EPIC techniques, long before papers on those subjects appeared in the West". Elbrus-1 and Elbrus-2 system software were implemented in high-level language El-76, which was used in Elbrus even instead of assembler. El-76 looks very much like Algol-68. The main difference seems to be in dynamic type linking in El-76 with all the required hardware support. El-76 is intended for system programming as well as for application one. Before execution complex El-76 operators are translated to Java-like bytecode. This bytecode is translated to simple micro-operations by a special unit at run-time. In Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computing Equipment Vladimir Pentkovski took part in the development of Elbrus-1 (1978) and Elbrus-2 (1984) supercomputers and led the development of El-90 superscalar 32-bit microprocessor. The technical statement of work was created in 1987, and the first El90 prototypes were built in 1990.The El90 architecture reflects a combination of RISC and Elbrus2 ideas. The main features of El-90 are:
In 1990 Pentkovski began working on El91S, the successor to the El90. But the political and economic changes in Russia stopped the financing. We don't know anything about Pentkovski between 1991 and 1999. In 1999 his name appeared again in Intel Technology Journal. According to the Author's Biographies section of the article devoted to Pentium III architecture, Vladimir Pentkovski led the development of Pentium III processor architecture. Also I would like to remind you that in 1993 Intel introduced an absolutely new 32-bit Pentium processor with lots of new features. Here they are:
Well, Pentium and El-90 seem to have so much in common, don't you think so? It seems that Pentium has been named after its developer - Vladimir Pentkovski. Really, in 1995 Intel introduced a more decent architecture, Pentium Pro, which has caught up with the Russian microprocessor of 1990. Pentium Pro had an improved x86 instruction decoder, improved superscalar core, and additionally got speculative and out-of-order execution with register renaming. Besides, it also featured better floating point numbers processing unit and multiprocessing support. And now Pentkovski's former chief, Boris Babaian, is going to bash Intel with a revolutionary new Elbrus E2K microprocessor. E2KElbrus E2K with EPIC architecture is developed by Russian company Elbrus International. The project is led by Boris A. Babaian, Associate Member of the Russian Academy of Science. Mass production is planned for 2001 in case the financial basis remains sufficient. We can suppose that E2K prototype will be introduced by the beginning of the year 2000. And it is likely to be manufactured on a mini-fab in Moscow. Now the processor exists only in form of a certain description on a special language called Verilog. This description embodies the final stage of the logical design, and then the Verilog description will be transferred into the silicon. The system software set for E2K is already completed. It includes the parallelizing compiler and binary x86 code translator. About two years ago Elbrus showed the running of MS Windows 95 and MS FlightSimulator game on Sun workstation with UltraSPARC processor. Elbrus E2K is expected to be much cooler than the American achievements in all respects. The E2K will deliver higher performance with lower power and less silicon. Moreover, the software binary translation provides absolute compatibility with x86 code almost without any performance reduction, which is not much worse than in case of E2K original code. By the way, the programming languages C and C++ with E2K static type are very likely to acquire new peculiar features: hardware supported type dynamics and context protection. The Russian achievement turned out of interest to Microsoft Corporation, which operation systems would really need the performance of E2K. The legend of the computer world - Gordon Bell, who developed DEC's famous PDP and VAX computers, now heads Microsoft Telepresence Research Group. He has contributed to the popularization of the Elbrus E2K project at international conferences. On 26 May he opened the International Symposium on High Performance Computing in Japan with the keynote speech "The Next Ten Years in Supercomputing" and on 10 June - the 14th Mannheim Supercomputer Conference in Germany. In both speeches Gordon Bell paid special attention to E2K. He presented a table comparing Elbrus E2K and Intel Merced on a slide, which looks as shown below. Note that the results are evidently not in Intel's favour:
As we can see E2K beats Merced in every row. Also Gordon Bell is a computer-consultant-at-large who devotes time to startup ventures for R&D in advanced computer technologies. ConclusionsElbrus E2K project has already won certain scientific and technical weight since there were developed a lot of interesting architectural solutions, and created perfect new generation compilers. Besides, E2K means that Russia still can boast highly qualified specialists. Professor Boris A. Babaian, and other Elbrus employees teach in Russian high schools, which implies the future increase of the specialists number in our country. So, my personal opinion is that the project has already succeeded, no matter what will come out of the silicon realization. Though Elbrus will probably disagree with me here, and prove the world that it's the best. |
