The Russian game console, which is being designed on behalf of Vladimir Putin, will run on Elbrus processors and other domestic components. Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy Anton Gorelkin spoke about this in his Telegram channel. According to him, Skolkovo specialists will need to offer something breakthrough.
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In addition to Russian components, the operating system will also be domestic – the Ministry of Industry and Trade has not yet made a decision on what to focus on: Aurora and Alt Linux are among the main candidates. The Skolkovo Foundation took upon itself the development of a business model, concept, as well as determining the competitive advantages of the device, and this is not an easy task, the deputy admitted.
“I hope my colleagues will take this task seriously and come up with something truly breakthrough. After all, it’s obvious to everyone: Elbrus processors are not yet at that stage of development to ensure equal competition with PS5 and Xbox, which means the solution must be non-standard.”,” noted Mr. Gorelkin. The project is not being created as a nominal product – porting old games to a console and reporting that the order has been completed will not work.
“This platform should serve primarily the purposes of promoting and popularizing domestic video game products, expanding their audience beyond PC and mobile gaming”“, the official emphasized.
The intention to use Elbrus processors raises several questions that have no answer yet. Firstly, these chips are built on the VLIW architecture, for which there are simply no games. It is possible to run PC games through an x86 emulator, but this will obviously have a detrimental effect on performance.
Another unresolved question is where to get processors? Although Elbrus chips are being developed by the Russian company MCST, the production of the most advanced modules in Russia is now impossible – the existing semiconductor lines are not capable of producing microcircuits using modern technical processes. Until February 2022, these chips were produced at the factories of Taiwanese TSMC, but after that it stopped working with Russian companies.
In the end, we will add that many people wanted to create the first domestic game console after Putin’s instructions. For example, the Don State Technical University announced that they are developing PlaySpace, a Russian analogue of the PlayStation, the prototype of which runs on an Intel Atom X5 processor, is equipped with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal memory. There is little domestic here, and besides, the authors of the project reported that the console will cost 47 thousand rubles. At the same time, mini-PCs with similar characteristics can be found on marketplaces five times cheaper – for only 8 thousand rubles.
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