Back in March of this year, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, ordered his government to develop and create its own game consoles, alongside with the necessary and relevant operating systems and cloud-based game delivery systems. Fast forward to today, and things are unsurprisingly not going well for it.
Russia now has two game consoles, sort of: the first is a machine powered by a Elbrus processor, developed in-country by the Moscow Centre of SPARC Technology (MCST), and based on the Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture. We doubt you’re wondering about the last bit but just in case you are, that’s an architecture Russia uses for domestic applications, including its critical infrastructure, defence, and other not-for-civilian-use areas.
Now, the Russian government has admitted that the Elbrus-powered game consoles won’t be trading blows with top-tier CPUs from the likes of Intel, AMD, or ARM; it says that it’ll be adequate for enterprise and government work but won’t be able to compete with a PS5 or Xbox which, honestly, kind of defeats the purpose of creating a game console.
“I hope that my colleagues will approach this task with full responsibility and come up with something truly breakthrough. After all, it is obvious to everyone: Elbrus processors are not yet at the stage of development that would ensure equal competition with PS5 and Xbox, which means that the solution must be non-standard.”
The second game consoles is one being developed by the Russian telecommunications firm MTS. As mentioned, this console will be made to support a cloud-based gaming platform called Fog Play. Based on the fluff, the execution sounds similar to NVIDIA’s GeForce Play, with a slight twist: It allows high-end PC owners to rent out their systems to those with less-powerful hardware, for an hourly fee.
MTS’s Fog Play game console is expected to cost US$45 (~RM201) and looks like it will come with an Xbox-inspired controller.
(Source: Habr, RBC, Techspot)
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