On July 4th, 2008, Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies (MCST) has presented to press a “100% Russian Computer”, Elbrus-3M. Each system has 64 microprocessors Elbrus.
CPU technical details:
frequency: 300MHz,
up to 23 commands per cycle per processor,
EPIC architecture,
each processor is comparable to Pentium III 500MHz,
130 nm technology.
First working prototype of Elbrus CPU has been presented in 1991. However, during 90s, development was frozen due to financial and organizational issues and been revived about 10 years ago. Next working prototype is known as Elbrus-2000 (E2K), however, it was not stable enough to be considered as a final one.
Now, after all these years, Elbrus is ready and being shipped to customers (primarily Russian military complex). About 100 systems are planned to be delivered to customers by the end of 2008.
Friends, first of all, let me point to the original source of these pictures: leprosorium.ru, a social web site where the most creative people from Russian segment of Internet make fun of everything.
Leprosorium is a private community, accessed by invited users only. So, in order to share these pics with the rest of the world, I’m publishing them here.
Some people say that HUMMER is the most brutal and monster-type production SUV that can be on streets. Russians think a bit different.
There is a truck, which has better off-road abilities than HUMMER, has 10mm all-around armor, anti-vandalism glass-protecting shields, can swim, is much cheaper and looks extremely cool. Just for about $34000 Russians (and Ukrainians) can enjoy it.
I’ve recently downloaded a new version of popular internet browser, Internet Explorer 8 beta. In a few days I’m going to test its performance against Firefox, Opera and Safari the same way I did before.
Meanwhile, I’m going to test drive IE 8.0 to see how it feels and if it could be a real competitor for Firefox or not.
So far I found kind of surprising thing: Internet Explorer 8 cannot properly display even their own (Microsoft) sites. Take a look are the screen shots below. It also has issues with www.digg.com and some others.
Damn you, web standards! Why there are no standards which are looking good in any version of IE? Now you have confused Microsoft team to the point, so they cannot focus even on testing their own web sites!
Russian State Insurance company published statistics of Russian middle-class grow in 2007.
In summary, year-to-year growth of households who make equivalent of 125 thousand dollars or more is 151%.
Russian economy is booming and it’s reflected in growing income of most of the Russian households. In average, Russians got 10.4% richer in 2007 comparing to 2006. Average monthly income per capita after taxes was 12.5 thousand rubles (about 500 dollars) and top 20% of Russians had average monthly income 29.8 thousand rubles or more (1.24 thousand dollars) comparing to 23.4 thousand a year ago.
