The Elbrus is a line of Soviet and Russian computer systems developed by the Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering. These computers are used in the space program, nuclear weapons research, and defense systems, as well as for theoretical and researching purposes, such as an experimental Refal and CLU translators.

History

Historically, computers under the Elbrus brand comprised several different instruction set architectures (ISAs). The first of them was the line of the large fourth-generation computers, developed by Vsevolod Burtsev. These were heavily influenced by the Burroughs large systems and similarly to them implemented tagged architecture and a variant of ALGOL-68 as system programming language. After that Burtsev retired, and new Lebedev's chief developer, Boris Babayan, introduced the completely new system architecture. Differing completely from the architecture of both Elbrus 1 and Elbrus 2, it employed a very long instruction word (VLIW) approach. In 1992, a spin-off company Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies (MCST) was created and continued development, using the "Elbrus" moniker as a brand for all computer systems developed by the company. In the late 1990s, a series of SPARC-based central processing units (CPUs) were developed at MCST as a way to raise funds for in-house semiconductor intellectual property core development and to fill the niche of domestically-developed CPUs for the backdoor-wary military. In June 2024, a new computer based on the “Elbrus-2S3 (Эльбрус-2С3) microprocessor” was developed by Roselektronika. In September 2024, The MCST company presented “Elbrus-2S3 (Эльбрус-2С3) microprocessor” at the 10th anniversary Russian forum "Microelectronics 2024".

Models

SPARC