10 ms·

An ARM killer from IIT-M?

187 points by prando 9y ago

0xbear 9y ago
ARM can’t be killed at this s point. Positioning themselves as ARM killer would not be the wisest move on anyone’s part.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  I think there's a "law" that goes something like "if there's a question in the title, the answer is no"
  - nsriv 9y ago
    Betteridge's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  One way to dethrone the competition might be to focus on openness: There are also security reasons for wanting to make a processor for India. “We don’t know really whether the processor we are getting from outside is trustworthy. Is it secure?” asks Kamakoti. “Suppose I want variants of a processor, for different needs – not just strategic, even civilian needs – I have to basically rely on the processor available to me, and fit my application to that. It is something like I bought the slipper and I am cutting my feet to fit into it.”
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    But in the case of ARM, you _do_ know, if you manufacture it yourself. ARM licenses intellectual property, not sells chips. Once you buy a license, you can inspect it and make sure it doesn’t have the bits you don’t like.
    - gsmadhusudan 9y ago
      That means I have to develop all the code from scratch anyway. the arch lic just gets me a ISA spec doc.Might as well start with another ISA that is free. But the issue is bigger. Shakti is also an exercise in using a high level HDL. We would not exist but for Bluespec, we really get a 6x to 10x productivity increase over Verilog. I also get the ability to do true formal proving of the correctness of my code. There is a reason why DARPA hose bluespec for their secure processor work.
      - TickleSteve 9y ago
        No, an ARM license gets you the implementation of a core in source form. You are free to modify it if needed, as many licensees do.
        monocasa 9y ago
        Depends on the license.
    - retailbuyout 9y ago
      My understanding is that you also need to license from intel if you have a chip.
- drudru11 9y ago
  I agree with this. I was just looking at the microcontroller market, and I can tell you that AVR is going to be around a long time (like PIC).
microcolonel 9y ago
Glad to hear that they'll be taping out one of the Shakti chips so soon. Can't wait to see what comes of the higher-end server (or workstation, if you're me) chips. That said... > “The capitalist computing bourgeoisie want to enslave us all with proprietary processing architectures, but the proletariat eventually produces its own processor alternative – an ISA for and by the people, where instruction sets aren’t subject to the whim of the royalty-driven class, and where licensing fees don’t oppress the workers’ BOMs (bill of materials),” writes Kevin Morris in the Electronics Engineering journal, lending colour and gravitas to what’s at stake in the processor industry. Comparing RISC-V to communism is pretty grody. RISC-V is precisely a capitalist revolution, shedding a layer of state protection of the ISA from the market, and unleashing the greed, passion, and proprietary zeal of the world on the task of bringing designs to market.
- CalChris 9y ago
  RISC-V was developed by the state, in particular, by UC Berkeley, a public school. And IIT Madras is also another public school. So again, a branch of the Indian state is developing this Shakti processor. There's really nothing capitalist about this at all.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    I'm sure Bluespec, TSMC, SiFive, NXP, Samsung, Qualcomm, Microsemi, Micron, Huawei, and NVIDIA don't think of it like that, the RISC-V foundation is also not UC Berkeley. Also, strictly speaking the UC system ain't the state, if they were, they would not be allowed to generate copyrights from work produced by employees. IBM at least partially (if not completely) covered the fabrication of the original UCB RISC-V chips. Though I'd generally agree in the case of IIT Madras, which is specifically engaging in a state effort to reduce import dependence in microelectronics (especially for defense and national infrastructure).
    - afsina 9y ago
      That is why most likely they will not succeed in economical sense. Commercial tech space is just way too fast for governments to follow efficiently.
dingo_bat 9y ago
These guys will have to drop out and start a funded company if they want this tech to go anywhere. I don't expect IIT-M to be able to manufacture and sell the finished design.
- vikiomega9 9y ago
  I'm not aware of universities doing manufacturing and selling finished design, they more or less license IP.
tonmoy 9y ago
Glad to see open source catching up to pro proprietary in this space. I’m assuming all their code is in this repo: https://bitbucket.org/casl/ https://bitbucket.org/casl/
throw3192312 9y ago
It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neither has Baidu, nor Tencent, nor Wechat. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba, and is on a long drawn collision course towards merging with Amazon. The startups I've seen generally seem to target foreign markets, or to service people who service foreign markets; this is inherently a tiny subset of India's population. Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone). I also feel there is generally a lot of self-flattering that goes on, often for this very reason. I'm old enough to remember the embarrassment that was to be 'India's answer to OLPC' (also conceived at an IIT of note).
- r_singh 9y ago
  I agree with this comment so much, it hurts.
- zaptheimpaler 9y ago
  With luck, Trump, the tightening H-1B/GC situation and the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide will push some talented people who would've otherwise left to stay in India. Modi has also pushed to make starting a business a quick process w.r.t paperwork.
  - PeachPlum 9y ago
    Resisting mass immigration to leach from your welfare state is not xenophobic.
    - throw3192312 9y ago
      Resisting immigration of a particular demographic, one that arguably contributes most to the coffers of the said welfare state, is well within epistemological domain of the word 'xenophobia'.
sitkack 9y ago
These folks have no qualms with ARM. They are building their own chips using the RISC-V ISA. This literally has nothing to do with ARM or Intel. The ISA isn't the hard part in building a chip, the building the chip part is. The thing they have going for using an existing ISA is that they get kernel and toolchain support. They have many millions in support in the project and see all the reasons why they will succeed. What would be awesome is if AMD gave them assistance in getting their parts running in EPYC sockets.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
To be honest though building a processor these days is not exactly difficult. That is especially true if you start with someone else's ISA and they have already created a GCC or LLVM back end for it. I was at Sun during the development of SPARC and as part of the Systems group we got to see a lot of the trade offs up front but these days transistors are not nearly so scarce. If you stick to 30 - 50Mhz for your first round you can simulate pretty much power on to shell prompt in a reasonable amount of time. Then there are the process specific issues that TSMC or Global Foundries or whomever will help you with translating your HDL into their most reliable node (probably 45nm or 90nm at the moment), then you'll build a test chip and it will likely do everything you want it to do and it will cost 10x what an equally powerful ARM chip will do, so you will really really want to use your chip instead of that one if you're going to design it into something. And that something has to be popular enough that you sell at least a million of them, otherwise you're going to eat a lot of Nonrecurring engineering (NRE) cost. It is certainly possible, but it is a long game and you have to survive the early years. Go back and read the history of ARM (and Acorn), Intel (and IBM), Motorola (and Sun and Apple), and Power PC (and Cisco). Then read the history of the Z8000, the NS32032, the AMD88000, and the TI 9900. When you look at the history from where we sit today you will see that building a new CPU is the easiest thing in the world, staying alive until it is relevant is exceptionally difficult and requires quite a bit of luck in addition to good design. I wish these guys a lot of luck, I would love to see a fully open architecture be even half as successful as ARM has been. They have to walk into this with their eyes open though, it is not going to be easy.
- bakul 9y ago
  Amd29000. Moto88000. And DEC alpha. But this is long due for India. Recall that the US semiconductor industry did have plenty of govt help at its inception. The Indian govt can similarly provide early support by being a customer. But still, it is going to be a tough row to hoe.
  - tasty_freeze 9y ago
    +1 for using the archaic phrase "tough row to hoe", and for using it correctly. :-) In the few times I've heard someone say it, they say "road to hoe" which doesn't really make sense.
happy-go-lucky 9y ago
> The landscape is full of thick trees that have set down roots for decades. Bats, deers, and monkeys, seemingly comfortable with the few thousand bicycle-riding students, academics, and staff on campus, are easy to spot. The air, thanks to a recent bout of rains in Chennai, is as good as a hill station In addition to the above description, a picture should have been inserted above or below the paragraph.
- gsmadhusudan 9y ago
  http://iglc2018.com/images/iit/4.jpg http://iglc2018.com/images/iit/4.jpg https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2200d147343aa841a43a07c3a3dc88fe-c https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2200d147343aa841a43a07... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OgX4b2N9a8E/S7OVv7jxhmI/AAAAAAAAAhY/E3E1YmXyrDM/s1600/IMG_1989.JPG http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OgX4b2N9a8E/S7OVv7jxhmI/AAAAAAAAAh... http://www.mbaskool.com/2013_images/photography/landscape_nature/Arun%20G-%20DoMS-%20IIT%20Madras%20-family%20time.jpg http://www.mbaskool.com/2013_images/photography/landscape_na... We are one of the last refuges of the endangered black buck. The spotted deer and bonnet macaques are more common in India. Odd that a university campus in the middle of a city is a refuge. The pic is that of an albino black buck, an even rarer mutant.
  - happy-go-lucky 9y ago
    Thank you very much. They're beautiful! An ideal academic environment imo.
  - krylon 9y ago
    Wow! I am happy when I can see a kestrel or a roe deer from my office. It must be amazing to work in such a beautiful scenery!
    - gsmadhusudan 9y ago
      Everything has to be monkey proofed, going to the refreshment room when a monkey gang is around is like running the gauntlet ! We are talking really aggressive simians. But totally worth it, I could spend hours watching the monkeys. Surprised that we do not have a simian cognition research group on campus. The slender loris are really beautiful too but I have never seen them. http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/multimedia/dynamic/02331/BLink_KalyanVarmaD_2331614f.jpg http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/multimedia/dynamic/02331... Now if I could get the monkeys to learn bluespec ...
ksec 9y ago
The Actual ARM license and IP, is relatively tiny in overall cost of the chip. It is a very small amount of money for time to market and ecosystem. ARMv8 ( Specifically the aarch64 part ) is like a clean start. I doubt RISC-V offer any advantage, especially we should now know the uArch is only tiny part of the equation, the implementation matters a lot. Apart from the fear of lock in or ARM suddenly hike the price 100x, what exactly is the benefits and motives for RISC-V? Or is this more of NIH Syndrome?
- gsmadhusudan 9y ago
  The Risc-V ISA is far more modular and extensible. Also we needed the 128 bit support for our NVM storage research and single address space OS work. No MMU, T-ISA based security, VIVT caches. Other govt projects do have ARM licenses, we chose not to go that way for purely technical reasons. Our lab does have academic collaboration with ARM.
gsmadhusudan 9y ago
As the lead architect of Shakti and the guy who helped kick-start the project, I figure I am owed my 2 cents ! 1. We never positioned it as an ARM killer ! That was the imagination of the reporter who wrote the article. 2. Shakti is not a state only project. Parts of Shakti are funded by the govt, these relate to cores and SoCs needed by the Govt. The defense and strategic sector procurement is huge, runs in the 10s of billions of USD.There is significant funding in terms of manpower, tools and free foundry shuttles provided by the private sector. In fact Shakti has more traction with the private sector than the govt sector in terms of immediate deployments. 3. The CPU eco-system including ARM's is a bit sclerotic. It is not the lic cost that is the problem, it is the inherent lack of flexibility in the model. 4. Shakti is not only a CPU. Other components include a new interconnect based on SRIO, GenZ with our extensions accompanied by open source silicon, a new NVMe+ based storage standard again based on open source SSD controller silicon (using Shakti cores of course), open source Rust based MK OS for supporting tagged ISAs for secure Shakti variants, fault tolerant variants for aerospace and ADAS applications, ML/AI accelerators based on our AI research (we are one of the top RL ML labs around). 4. the Shakti program will also deliver a whole host of IPs including the smaller trivial ones and also as needed bigger blocks like SRIO, PCIe and DDR4. All open source of course. 5. We are also doing our own 10G and 25G PHYs 6. A few startups will come out of this but that can wait till we have a good open source base. 7. The standard cores coming out of IIT will be production grade and not research chips. And building a processor is still tough these days. Try building a 16 core, quad wide server monster with 4 DDR4 channels, 4x25G I/O ports, 2 ports for multi-socket support. All connected via a power optimized mesh fabric. Of course you have to develop the on-chip and off-chip cache coherency stuff too ! 8. And yes we are in talks with AMD for using the EPYC socket. But don't think they will bite. Just ignore the India bit and look at what Shakti aims to achieve, then you will get a better picture. I have no idea how successful we will be and I frankly do not care. What we will achieve (and have to some extent already) is - create a critical mass of CPU architects in India - create a concept to fab eco-system ind India for designing any class of CPUs - add a good dose of practical CPU design knowhow into the engineering curriculum - become one of the top 5 CPU arch labs around Shakti is already going into production. The first design is actually in the control system of an experimental civilian nuclear reactor. IIT is within the fallout zone so you can be sure we will get the design right. If you want any further info, mail me. My email is on the Shakti site. G S Madhusudan
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cvs268 9y ago
Very inspiring news! :) Looking forward to the day when we would be able to run popular open source SW frameworks like NodeMCU and Linux on open hardware like this. Submitted my first PR to the bitbucket repo (a minor one) https://bitbucket.org/casl/shakti_public/pull-requests/1 https://bitbucket.org/casl/shakti_public/pull-requests/1
snvzz 9y ago
Did I miss the privileged ISA becoming standard? Sure they don't want to release a chip using the draft.
fithisux 9y ago
It reminds me of the Loongson/Godson effort.
CaptainHaddock 9y ago
Good to see these fellas in action. It is nice to see that India is trying to set up a chip manufacturing ecosystem. There will be a lot of pitfalls though. From my long stint in chip design, I predict that the initial phases will be difficult. Like, the first few efforts might be defective/have odd timing bugs/power/reset problems and it will be very discouraging and frustrating. If they can push through this phase, then I can already imagine India's rise in the IoT/strategic or whatever industry they are targeting. I also hope that this effort pushes the government/private sector to set up fabs in India. Stay strong, all of us are bidding for you guys. A quick lookup on the internet shows that SHAKTI is from R.I.S.E group. We are waiting to see you rise!

187 points by prando 9y ago

ARM can’t be killed at this s point. Positioning themselves as ARM killer would not be the wisest move on anyone’s part.

ReverseCold 9y ago
I think there's a "law" that goes something like "if there's a question in the title, the answer is no"
- nsriv 9y ago
  Betteridge's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
sillysaurus3 9y ago
One way to dethrone the competition might be to focus on openness: There are also security reasons for wanting to make a processor for India. “We don’t know really whether the processor we are getting from outside is trustworthy. Is it secure?” asks Kamakoti. “Suppose I want variants of a processor, for different needs – not just strategic, even civilian needs – I have to basically rely on the processor available to me, and fit my application to that. It is something like I bought the slipper and I am cutting my feet to fit into it.”
- 0xbear 9y ago
  But in the case of ARM, you _do_ know, if you manufacture it yourself. ARM licenses intellectual property, not sells chips. Once you buy a license, you can inspect it and make sure it doesn’t have the bits you don’t like.
  - gsmadhusudan 9y ago
    That means I have to develop all the code from scratch anyway. the arch lic just gets me a ISA spec doc.Might as well start with another ISA that is free. But the issue is bigger. Shakti is also an exercise in using a high level HDL. We would not exist but for Bluespec, we really get a 6x to 10x productivity increase over Verilog. I also get the ability to do true formal proving of the correctness of my code. There is a reason why DARPA hose bluespec for their secure processor work.
    - TickleSteve 9y ago
      No, an ARM license gets you the implementation of a core in source form. You are free to modify it if needed, as many licensees do.
      - monocasa 9y ago
        Depends on the license.
  - retailbuyout 9y ago
    My understanding is that you also need to license from intel if you have a chip.
drudru11 9y ago
I agree with this. I was just looking at the microcontroller market, and I can tell you that AVR is going to be around a long time (like PIC).

microcolonel 9y ago

Glad to hear that they'll be taping out one of the Shakti chips so soon. Can't wait to see what comes of the higher-end server (or workstation, if you're me) chips. That said... > “The capitalist computing bourgeoisie want to enslave us all with proprietary processing architectures, but the proletariat eventually produces its own processor alternative – an ISA for and by the people, where instruction sets aren’t subject to the whim of the royalty-driven class, and where licensing fees don’t oppress the workers’ BOMs (bill of materials),” writes Kevin Morris in the Electronics Engineering journal, lending colour and gravitas to what’s at stake in the processor industry. Comparing RISC-V to communism is pretty grody. RISC-V is precisely a capitalist revolution, shedding a layer of state protection of the ISA from the market, and unleashing the greed, passion, and proprietary zeal of the world on the task of bringing designs to market.

CalChris 9y ago
RISC-V was developed by the state, in particular, by UC Berkeley, a public school. And IIT Madras is also another public school. So again, a branch of the Indian state is developing this Shakti processor. There's really nothing capitalist about this at all.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  I'm sure Bluespec, TSMC, SiFive, NXP, Samsung, Qualcomm, Microsemi, Micron, Huawei, and NVIDIA don't think of it like that, the RISC-V foundation is also not UC Berkeley. Also, strictly speaking the UC system ain't the state, if they were, they would not be allowed to generate copyrights from work produced by employees. IBM at least partially (if not completely) covered the fabrication of the original UCB RISC-V chips. Though I'd generally agree in the case of IIT Madras, which is specifically engaging in a state effort to reduce import dependence in microelectronics (especially for defense and national infrastructure).
  - afsina 9y ago
    That is why most likely they will not succeed in economical sense. Commercial tech space is just way too fast for governments to follow efficiently.

dingo_bat 9y ago

These guys will have to drop out and start a funded company if they want this tech to go anywhere. I don't expect IIT-M to be able to manufacture and sell the finished design.

vikiomega9 9y ago
I'm not aware of universities doing manufacturing and selling finished design, they more or less license IP.

tonmoy 9y ago

Glad to see open source catching up to pro proprietary in this space. I’m assuming all their code is in this repo: https://bitbucket.org/casl/ https://bitbucket.org/casl/

throw3192312 9y ago

It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neither has Baidu, nor Tencent, nor Wechat. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba, and is on a long drawn collision course towards merging with Amazon. The startups I've seen generally seem to target foreign markets, or to service people who service foreign markets; this is inherently a tiny subset of India's population. Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone). I also feel there is generally a lot of self-flattering that goes on, often for this very reason. I'm old enough to remember the embarrassment that was to be 'India's answer to OLPC' (also conceived at an IIT of note).

r_singh 9y ago
I agree with this comment so much, it hurts.
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
With luck, Trump, the tightening H-1B/GC situation and the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide will push some talented people who would've otherwise left to stay in India. Modi has also pushed to make starting a business a quick process w.r.t paperwork.
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  Resisting mass immigration to leach from your welfare state is not xenophobic.
  - throw3192312 9y ago
    Resisting immigration of a particular demographic, one that arguably contributes most to the coffers of the said welfare state, is well within epistemological domain of the word 'xenophobia'.

sitkack 9y ago

These folks have no qualms with ARM. They are building their own chips using the RISC-V ISA. This literally has nothing to do with ARM or Intel. The ISA isn't the hard part in building a chip, the building the chip part is. The thing they have going for using an existing ISA is that they get kernel and toolchain support. They have many millions in support in the project and see all the reasons why they will succeed. What would be awesome is if AMD gave them assistance in getting their parts running in EPYC sockets.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

To be honest though building a processor these days is not exactly difficult. That is especially true if you start with someone else's ISA and they have already created a GCC or LLVM back end for it. I was at Sun during the development of SPARC and as part of the Systems group we got to see a lot of the trade offs up front but these days transistors are not nearly so scarce. If you stick to 30 - 50Mhz for your first round you can simulate pretty much power on to shell prompt in a reasonable amount of time. Then there are the process specific issues that TSMC or Global Foundries or whomever will help you with translating your HDL into their most reliable node (probably 45nm or 90nm at the moment), then you'll build a test chip and it will likely do everything you want it to do and it will cost 10x what an equally powerful ARM chip will do, so you will really really want to use your chip instead of that one if you're going to design it into something. And that something has to be popular enough that you sell at least a million of them, otherwise you're going to eat a lot of Nonrecurring engineering (NRE) cost. It is certainly possible, but it is a long game and you have to survive the early years. Go back and read the history of ARM (and Acorn), Intel (and IBM), Motorola (and Sun and Apple), and Power PC (and Cisco). Then read the history of the Z8000, the NS32032, the AMD88000, and the TI 9900. When you look at the history from where we sit today you will see that building a new CPU is the easiest thing in the world, staying alive until it is relevant is exceptionally difficult and requires quite a bit of luck in addition to good design. I wish these guys a lot of luck, I would love to see a fully open architecture be even half as successful as ARM has been. They have to walk into this with their eyes open though, it is not going to be easy.

bakul 9y ago
Amd29000. Moto88000. And DEC alpha. But this is long due for India. Recall that the US semiconductor industry did have plenty of govt help at its inception. The Indian govt can similarly provide early support by being a customer. But still, it is going to be a tough row to hoe.
- tasty_freeze 9y ago
  +1 for using the archaic phrase "tough row to hoe", and for using it correctly. :-) In the few times I've heard someone say it, they say "road to hoe" which doesn't really make sense.

happy-go-lucky 9y ago

> The landscape is full of thick trees that have set down roots for decades. Bats, deers, and monkeys, seemingly comfortable with the few thousand bicycle-riding students, academics, and staff on campus, are easy to spot. The air, thanks to a recent bout of rains in Chennai, is as good as a hill station In addition to the above description, a picture should have been inserted above or below the paragraph.

gsmadhusudan 9y ago
http://iglc2018.com/images/iit/4.jpg http://iglc2018.com/images/iit/4.jpg https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2200d147343aa841a43a07c3a3dc88fe-c https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2200d147343aa841a43a07... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OgX4b2N9a8E/S7OVv7jxhmI/AAAAAAAAAhY/E3E1YmXyrDM/s1600/IMG_1989.JPG http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OgX4b2N9a8E/S7OVv7jxhmI/AAAAAAAAAh... http://www.mbaskool.com/2013_images/photography/landscape_nature/Arun%20G-%20DoMS-%20IIT%20Madras%20-family%20time.jpg http://www.mbaskool.com/2013_images/photography/landscape_na... We are one of the last refuges of the endangered black buck. The spotted deer and bonnet macaques are more common in India. Odd that a university campus in the middle of a city is a refuge. The pic is that of an albino black buck, an even rarer mutant.
- happy-go-lucky 9y ago
  Thank you very much. They're beautiful! An ideal academic environment imo.
- krylon 9y ago
  Wow! I am happy when I can see a kestrel or a roe deer from my office. It must be amazing to work in such a beautiful scenery!
  - gsmadhusudan 9y ago
    Everything has to be monkey proofed, going to the refreshment room when a monkey gang is around is like running the gauntlet ! We are talking really aggressive simians. But totally worth it, I could spend hours watching the monkeys. Surprised that we do not have a simian cognition research group on campus. The slender loris are really beautiful too but I have never seen them. http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/multimedia/dynamic/02331/BLink_KalyanVarmaD_2331614f.jpg http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/multimedia/dynamic/02331... Now if I could get the monkeys to learn bluespec ...

ksec 9y ago

The Actual ARM license and IP, is relatively tiny in overall cost of the chip. It is a very small amount of money for time to market and ecosystem. ARMv8 ( Specifically the aarch64 part ) is like a clean start. I doubt RISC-V offer any advantage, especially we should now know the uArch is only tiny part of the equation, the implementation matters a lot. Apart from the fear of lock in or ARM suddenly hike the price 100x, what exactly is the benefits and motives for RISC-V? Or is this more of NIH Syndrome?

gsmadhusudan 9y ago
The Risc-V ISA is far more modular and extensible. Also we needed the 128 bit support for our NVM storage research and single address space OS work. No MMU, T-ISA based security, VIVT caches. Other govt projects do have ARM licenses, we chose not to go that way for purely technical reasons. Our lab does have academic collaboration with ARM.

gsmadhusudan 9y ago

As the lead architect of Shakti and the guy who helped kick-start the project, I figure I am owed my 2 cents ! 1. We never positioned it as an ARM killer ! That was the imagination of the reporter who wrote the article. 2. Shakti is not a state only project. Parts of Shakti are funded by the govt, these relate to cores and SoCs needed by the Govt. The defense and strategic sector procurement is huge, runs in the 10s of billions of USD.There is significant funding in terms of manpower, tools and free foundry shuttles provided by the private sector. In fact Shakti has more traction with the private sector than the govt sector in terms of immediate deployments. 3. The CPU eco-system including ARM's is a bit sclerotic. It is not the lic cost that is the problem, it is the inherent lack of flexibility in the model. 4. Shakti is not only a CPU. Other components include a new interconnect based on SRIO, GenZ with our extensions accompanied by open source silicon, a new NVMe+ based storage standard again based on open source SSD controller silicon (using Shakti cores of course), open source Rust based MK OS for supporting tagged ISAs for secure Shakti variants, fault tolerant variants for aerospace and ADAS applications, ML/AI accelerators based on our AI research (we are one of the top RL ML labs around). 4. the Shakti program will also deliver a whole host of IPs including the smaller trivial ones and also as needed bigger blocks like SRIO, PCIe and DDR4. All open source of course. 5. We are also doing our own 10G and 25G PHYs 6. A few startups will come out of this but that can wait till we have a good open source base. 7. The standard cores coming out of IIT will be production grade and not research chips. And building a processor is still tough these days. Try building a 16 core, quad wide server monster with 4 DDR4 channels, 4x25G I/O ports, 2 ports for multi-socket support. All connected via a power optimized mesh fabric. Of course you have to develop the on-chip and off-chip cache coherency stuff too ! 8. And yes we are in talks with AMD for using the EPYC socket. But don't think they will bite. Just ignore the India bit and look at what Shakti aims to achieve, then you will get a better picture. I have no idea how successful we will be and I frankly do not care. What we will achieve (and have to some extent already) is - create a critical mass of CPU architects in India - create a concept to fab eco-system ind India for designing any class of CPUs - add a good dose of practical CPU design knowhow into the engineering curriculum - become one of the top 5 CPU arch labs around Shakti is already going into production. The first design is actually in the control system of an experimental civilian nuclear reactor. IIT is within the fallout zone so you can be sure we will get the design right. If you want any further info, mail me. My email is on the Shakti site. G S Madhusudan

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cvs268 9y ago

Very inspiring news! :) Looking forward to the day when we would be able to run popular open source SW frameworks like NodeMCU and Linux on open hardware like this. Submitted my first PR to the bitbucket repo (a minor one) https://bitbucket.org/casl/shakti_public/pull-requests/1 https://bitbucket.org/casl/shakti_public/pull-requests/1

snvzz 9y ago

Did I miss the privileged ISA becoming standard? Sure they don't want to release a chip using the draft.

fithisux 9y ago

It reminds me of the Loongson/Godson effort.

CaptainHaddock 9y ago

Good to see these fellas in action. It is nice to see that India is trying to set up a chip manufacturing ecosystem. There will be a lot of pitfalls though. From my long stint in chip design, I predict that the initial phases will be difficult. Like, the first few efforts might be defective/have odd timing bugs/power/reset problems and it will be very discouraging and frustrating. If they can push through this phase, then I can already imagine India's rise in the IoT/strategic or whatever industry they are targeting. I also hope that this effort pushes the government/private sector to set up fabs in India. Stay strong, all of us are bidding for you guys. A quick lookup on the internet shows that SHAKTI is from R.I.S.E group. We are waiting to see you rise!