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Eg 10102 - mov R1, R2
Very elegant and human readable machine code.
Btw, the same processor was used in the MK85 “calculator” which in essence was a mobile computer (ca 1990!). I owned one not knowing that fact, and was so amazed to realize it was actually a 1801vm1/vm2 architecture when I unsoldered ROM from it, connected to my parallel port and read its content - it had that familiar code there!!
They made many clones of Western designs but had also number of original designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_microprocessors
Systime was doing fine selling VT100 compatible terminals but went seeking bigger bucks. I think the VAX was a sweetspot for them while it lasted. They went bust in the end.
Their headquarters in Leeds was a futuristic (for the 1980s) building with magstripe guided parts moving robots, a fantastic works cafeteria, the owners helicopter parked outside, and featured in a nuclear missile thriller TV series called "edge of darkness" -I worked at Leeds Uni on a systime funded research project and spent time there. Nice people in the research labs, smart, motivated.
> Newer devices from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine are listed here if they are labelled according to the Soviet integrated circuit designation.
There was an article about some Russian bank testing out the e2k, but they reported that the Elbrus-8C, was not acceptable. The 8C is 28nm, so made by TSMC, so even if it could perform it would be available.
I'm still curious about the chip though.
The problem isn't performance, it's the architecture. Supposedly, it's intended use case is being a processor for radar control systems with lots of floating point number-crunching/DSP/whatever power to process input data in real-time and also run some general purpose code based on results, all in a single package. Other tasks rarely need that combination of features, it's either top general purpose performance on x86 servers, or top number crunching performance on supercomputers.
Random links:
http://www.elbrus.ru/files/521dd0/256487/1a773c/000000/2014-...
More detailed on page 100 in this book (with many details on other pages, obviously):
http://mcst.ru/doc/book_121130.pdf
Random paper on optimizations:
https://doi.org/10.14529/mmp200109
I remember seeing some benchmark results some time ago in which optimized x86 code running via Elbrus software+hardware translation was faster than native Elbrus compile for the generic C code. Unfortunately, VLIV compilers must be very smart, and ingest all the software and hardware optimizations from others to compete with common architectures.
If you care, enough to steal, the real best.
(The word "настоящий" used as the translation of "very" means "real". For the rest we can leave the original english words and with commas even have some similar broken language effect)
http://blog.funcall.org/hadrware%20vintage%20pdp/2017/03/14/...
Boards like these were used both in DVK systems and in different CNC controllers.
I actually built a custom board with a K1801VM1 a while back to teach my son programming basics from the ground up. It's slow as molasses, but great at this purpose. The PDP-11 ISA is simple and comprehensible, as well as the 1801 microarchitecture. Underclocking and a few LEDs in the key points of the board can easily illustrate the entire process; it's very direct and you can almost physically see it "thinking" under the hood. We used that board to drive our Christmas lights and for simple games before moving to something more high-level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...
It looks like it has status signals so that program and data memory spaces can be split, the English translation has this funny comment:
"When working with weapons of mass destruction, system memory is “hidden”, i.e. its addresses in program mode do not occupy RAM address space. "
A factory in my hometown used to have CNC mills with these systems as controllers and they were regularly pilfered by the socialist workers. The backplane had insane amounts of gold plating (grams!) on edge connectors and boards themselves used platinum/palladium capacitors for bypass! These were stripped on the SBC specimen in my blog post above too.
