Researchers with the Moscow Center for SPARC Technologies (MCST) have announced a new, homegrown CPU core is ready for the mass market. Dubbed the Elbrus-4C, this new chip is based a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) architecture — and includes the ability to emulate x86 instructions. Most of our discussions at ExtremeTech involve architectures from AMD, Intel, or ARM — but this is an interesting opportunity to look at something altogether different.