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India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023
- TMWNN 5y ago
- higanbana 5y agoFirst time in my life seeing a localized ISA
- zozbot234 5y agoThere's nothing "localized" or exclusive to India about RISC-V, it's simply the most prominent open ISA at present.
- mayama 5y agoChina already did that decades ago. They initially choose MIPS with their LoongSon processors in 2000s, and pivoted to arm processors with the mobile chips wave later with Allwinner and Unisoc. They had supercomputers running with their own MIPS cpus too.
- Taniwha 5y agoUsed to be instruction sets were corporate (IBM, DEC, Burroughs etc), seeing one mandated by a country really isn't that different
- slimsag 5y agoAs someone who doesn't follow RISC-V too closely, how does the most modern one (either available or planned) stack up in terms of perf compared to x86/arm? Just curious when these will begin to become viable for consumer devices. Years? Decades?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mhh__ 5y agoIn terms of current chips they're the best part of a decade away. You can't buy a RISC-V processor competitive with a good arm chip let alone an X86 or a really good arm chip like M1 Current cores, however, are fairly competitive in terms of perf per MHz, but this has to be taken with a grain of salt because the proof is in the taste not the ingredients.
- socialdemocrat 5y agoRISC-V cores are about 4 years behind ARM. So most they are most suitable for embedded systems and single board computers at the moment. At the lower end they have a big advantage as they can reach similar performance as Arm at half the silicon which translates into 4x lower price at similar volume of production. But for high-end chips you will not see this difference. SiFive has caught up about 2 years each year. So I suspect it will not work 3-4 years before RISC-V can compete with Arm desktop computers. Competing with Apple will take much longer. But such perspectives kind of miss the point. Then beauty of RISC-V is that it can be used in all sorts of specialized hardware such as accelerators. You may be able to program AI engines or maybe even some kind of graphics card with RISC-V instructions in the future.
- zozbot234 5y agoIf anything, a more streamlined frontend matters more at the high-end, because it enables more scalable decode letting you extract increased parallelism out of the code. Better use of your frontend complexity budget also makes it easier to use things like fused microinsn sequences, or the RISC-V compressed insn set which brings code density on par with x86 (an outstanding result for such a clean design) for both RV32 and RV64. This is pretty much what we see going from x86 to ARM, and RISC-V only goes further in the same direction.
- seoaeu 5y agoDecode doesn't take up much space in a high-end processor. Even if your architecture's decoder doesn't "scale" as well, you can just throw a bunch more transistors at it to get performance. That said, I doubt there's many CPU designers unhappy about a simpler ISA...
- imtringued 5y agoIf macro op fusion is viable then there are more opportunities to throw more transistors at it to get more performance.
- 5y ago
- duskwuff 5y agoAll of the commercially available RISC-V processors I'm aware of are microcontrollers -- they're competing with ARM Cortex-M. They're still a ways off from anything that can compete with ARM Cortex-A application processors or Intel/AMD desktop/laptop CPUs.
- beebeepka 5y agoNot just controllers. There are several commercially available single board computers running Linux. Check out the "explaining computers" YouTube channel for at least a couple fairly recent board reviews. They are slow but do exist
- seoaeu 5y agoMany billions of RISC-V of CPUs have shipped, so, pedantically, that means they're already viable for including inside consumer devices. However as other replies have noted, you'll have to wait a number of years before they'll be used as the main CPU, rather than just some tiny core off on the side doing power management or whatever.
- ramshanker 5y agoOnce a working computer is available commercially, A mandate would be issued by the central government ministries to 250+ Public Sector Undertaking ( Companies with >50% govt equity) to procure only these RISCV computers. This way we can definitely bring it up to speed real fast. PS: From my experience working currently for one of those PSUs .
- IceWreck 5y agoI doubt this will happen, even if they do issue a mandate. Indian government computers are still running windows 7 or so and its hard to get them to switch to Linux. What happens when theyre forced to run Linux and a new architecture ? All of them will just obtain exemptions to continue using windows + x86 claiming some software they need doesnt work. Teaching a 50 year govt employee how to use QEMU + Wine to emulate x86 and then run a translation layer to run windows software is impossible.
- zozbot234 5y ago> Indian government computers are still running windows 7 or so and its hard to get them to switch to Linux. In many ways, switching from Win7 to Linux is more convenient than going with Win 10 and more recent MS products. This is a significant opportunity where real change might be possible.
- abc_lisper 5y ago
- zozbot234 5y agoIt's a modern website in brutalist web style. Looks perfect.
- ianmcgowan 5y agoI think it's meant to be embedded in the main site, perhaps using this URL: https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetail.aspx?PRID=1820621 https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetail.aspx?PRID=1820621 Looks dated, but not that brutalist in that format...
- sofixa 5y agoIt's not that modern, on a phone the photos are only half visible.
- kragen 5y agoIt has random capitalization of common nouns, misspells "x86" as "x-86", and has no <title> tag. There's nothing perfect about it. It's embarrassing. I don't know enough about Indian English to know if "reminisce" is really a transitive verb there, unlike my own idiolect, but I do know "startups" is not a proper noun in Indian English. Apparently the Ministry of Electronics & IT is headed by the government officials who hired the people who approved this press release. I hope the involvement of such people does not destroy the Shakti project, which is one of the most promising 1% of RISC-V implementations.
- jabl 5y agoIIRC the Shakti family didn't include the C extension, which would make it incompatible with most Linux distros who have chosen to require it. Is this still the case?
- jayp1418 5y agoShakti website mentions using Ada language which is better for embedded development. Govt.'s focus right now seems Agriculture and similar industries
- zozbot234 5y agoThen they should totally make an Ada extension for RISC-V and replace all those clunky outdated iAPX 432's.
- sanxiyn 5y agoI don't know whether Shakti didn't support C extension in the past, but it certainly supports it now. I just checked the decoder source code right now.
- kragen 5y agoEven if that were the case, recompiling Debian with different compiler options is not rocket science—thanks to decades of tireless work by thousands of volunteers. Probably someone will read your comment and think "the C extension" means "support for the programming language C", but that is not the case. Standard RISC-V instruction set extensions are identified by letters: M for multiply (and unfortunately divide), F for floating point, D for double-precision floating point, A for atomic memory operations (necessary for SMP), V for vector operations, and so on. The C extension is the "compressed" extension, which represents the most common instructions in 16 bits instead of the usual 32. Without the C extension, RISC-V code is relatively bulky, which is a disadvantage not only for limited-memory microcontrollers but also because, if you have an instruction cache, less code fits into it, so most software runs slower. With the C extension, RISC-V code density is at least competitive with the best alternatives like Thumb2, and in most cases slightly better. This is particularly interesting in the 64-bit space, because arm64 (aarch64) has abandoned the Thumb2-style compressed instruction approach.
- qiskit 5y agoHopefully they'll take a holistic approach - from processor to memory to disk to kernel to application. India should have players in every aspect of technology. They should also invest more in research. Why does india have less supercomputers than sweden? Does this mean that india is doing less research in some aspects than a country of just 10 million people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 India is not and has not been living up to its potential. But as has been shown in the US, Japan, China, etc, all it takes is political will and political stability and you can make significant strides in just one generation.
- phendrenad2 5y agoAre supercomputers practical, or a vanity project?
- ip26 5y agoSupposedly that depends in part on whether you are a nuclear power.
- dotnet00 5y agoThey very much are practical for all sorts of research, e.g. simulations of molecular dynamics, fluid dynamics, light scattering etc, all very relevant for medical research for instance. A lot of the research work I do wouldn't really be practical without access to supercomputers, yet the results feed back into pretty much every high-tech industry.
- rjn 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputing_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputing_in_India
- oblio 5y ago> They should also invest more in research. Why does india have less supercomputers than sweden? Does this mean that india is doing less research in some aspects than a country of just 10 million people? India is huge, but only about 100 million Indians were considered part of the global middle class before Covid and now it's apparently only about 70 million. And the global middle class starts at about $3500 per year, which would probably mean starvation level in Sweden. For people with comparable incomes, India is most likely "only" 3-4 Swedens, maybe even less. So maybe 40 million people. Poor countries, people wise, are much smaller than they seem. I come from a poor country and you can definitely feel this.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- screwgoth 5y agoI remember an equally ambitious initiative called HSMC (Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) was in talks a few years ago. I hope this one takes-off the ground in a better way. It's about time.
- gigatexal 5y agoHere’s hoping there’s a standard that develops for building the motherboards and for how peripherals communicate etc so that it avoids the weirdness in the ARM ecosystem.
- laxmin 5y agoWe need diverse sources for critical technologies like chips. Right now, there are baskets of eggs in countries like Taiwan that are perpetually under the threat of invasion from China. India, with its stable democracy is a safer bet for the world as a source of chips.