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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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).<p>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).
As the lead architect of Shakti and the guy who helped kick-start the project, I figure I am owed my 2 cents !<p>1. We never positioned it as an ARM killer ! That was the imagination of the reporter who wrote the article.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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
These folks have no qualms with ARM. They are building their own chips using the RISC-V ISA. This literally has <i>nothing</i> to do with ARM or Intel.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Apart from the fear of lock in or ARM suddenly hike the price 100x, what exactly is the benefits and motives for RISC-V?<p>Or is this more of NIH Syndrome?
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!
Glad to see open source catching up to pro proprietary in this space.<p>I’m assuming all their code is in this repo: <a href="https://bitbucket.org/casl/" rel="nofollow">https://bitbucket.org/casl/</a>
Very inspiring news! :)<p>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.<p>Submitted my first PR to the bitbucket repo (a minor one)
<a href="https://bitbucket.org/casl/shakti_public/pull-requests/1" rel="nofollow">https://bitbucket.org/casl/shakti_public/pull-requests/1</a>
> 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<p>In addition to the above description, a picture should have been inserted above or below the paragraph.
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.<p>That said...<p>> <i>“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.</i><p>Comparing RISC-V to communism is pretty grody. RISC-V is <i>precisely</i> 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.
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.