What's weird is Russia simultaneously has teams building CPU's so threatening that Intel will buy one in defense but the one making desktops is worse than what some academics built on RISC-V and OpenSPARC. Russia needs to pay their top people for a competitive design that can be cheaply licensed due to the subsidy. Then sponsor some SoC's. Then a desktop. Then get the process rolling.
Pretty sure he is thinking of Elbrus, but AFAIK nothing actually happened from that being announced back in 2004... Elbrus still exists and is making chips. They were basically the Russian Transmeta.
I saw the is buying article but not if they concluded the deal. It was a huge amount of money. I also remember the tech description was like a better version of Itanium. I thought they were blocking an Itanium rival before it hit market.
Didnt follow it from there as I was doing a quick survey of Russian chips and fabs.
That's exactly the one I read! Thanks Jenya! So, not only was I right they could make Intel-grade chips: they've been doing it at Intel since 2004. Haha. There should be some more in Russia, though, that could support a larger team of hardware people. They could also try to lure the best ones back or get some from IBM's POWER team.
