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An ARM killer from IIT-M?

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Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#71

Post by TickleSteve »

gsmadhusudan wrote: post #36
0xbear wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 i…

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.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#72

Post by phkahler »

gsmadhusudan wrote: post #30

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…

You said "open source Rust based MK OS..." Does that mean an OS written in Rust? I had not heard of that. As I recall the Rust support for RISC-V is quite limited for now until the LLVM patches go upstream (which will be soon).

I agree with your statement "I have no idea how successful we will be and I frankly do not care." There will be a lot of benefits as a result of this work regardless of the immediate outcome. Keep building the future!

There are a lot of comments here on HN that seem completely uninformed of what's actually happening with RISC-V. They are about to be surprised.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#73

Post by mrob »

raverbashing wrote: post #65
pedroaraujo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is simply not true. Building a CPU can be "easy" if you want to build something that works. If you want to build something that is power efficient and, at the same time, quite performant, then the complexity of the problem escalates very quickly. Sticking at 30-50 MHz? What is this even supposed to mean? Digital hardware design hardly takes clock speeds into consideration, except during physical implementation i…

> What is this even supposed to mean? Digital hardware design hardly takes clock speeds into consideration You purport to correct him and then you drop this phrase, which is questionable at best and wrong at worse. You do design something that has different clock speeds differently. (Pipelining, power consumption, delays across different parts of the circuit). This is not anything too fancy, this is digital design/IC…

For a well known example of how this matters, consider the Pentium 4. Intel designed it with a deep pipeline on the assumption that they'd be able to reach higher clock speeds than was actually possible. At the intended 10GHz, the Pentium 4 would have had impressive performance for the time. But they couldn't achieve that clock speed, so they had to revert to the simpler pipeline design first used in the Pentium Pro and continue development from there.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#74

Post by CaptainHaddock »

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!

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#75

Post by gsmadhusudan »

mindentropy wrote: post #55
gsmadhusudan wrote: post #30

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…

Thank you for all the efforts. I am interested in MCU synthesis on FPGAs and this is a really interesting project. I just have one request though. If you are interested in Makers taking interest in your project please make sure your documentation is top quality. Also try to provide cheap dev boards so that the community can provide Linux or some RTOS port. I being in India it would help immensely if you have your dev…

I am very much interested in the maker community and would certainly do whatever it takes to engage that segment. Doc is th Achilles heel of efforts like ours and we intend to address that. Our code for example is extremely well commented and structured.We have 20 character variable names !We work with Xilinx, Altera and Microsemi and will target low cost dev boards but more importantly also tapeout ASICs for arduino boards.But first need to focus on our tapeouts.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#76

Post by CalChris »

microcolonel wrote: post #14
CalChris wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 chip…

Strictly speaking, the UC System is the state. That IBM funded some of RISC-V doesn’t make RISC-V a capitalist product nor does TSMC manufacturing some silicon. The US Government and the University of California can claim intellectual property rights including patents, copyrights and trademarks. That SiFive is incorporated to exploit RISC-V as was Sun Microsystems to exploit 4.2 changes nothing.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#77

Post by TheArcane »

wsxcde wrote: post #34
throw3192312 wrote: post #11

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 foreig…

Why do Baidu and Tencent count, but Infosys and TCS not count? Each of these have companies with >10B USD of revenue, so it's not like the Chinese companies are any larger. And don't tell me, it's because of the difference between product and service companies, because that is meaningless distinction from the perspective of a hardware-marker. They all need hardware to run on and arguably a service company needs more.…

> the US is much less attractive destination

The US is still extremely attractive, especially for STEM talent.Indian educated migrants think of Trump as a temporary phase; and given how migrants power the American tech industry, they feel impervious to most Trump related threats.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#78

Post by gsmadhusudan »

laughingman2 wrote: post #51
gsmadhusudan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, we started Shakti because our lab can track technology faster than a commercial outfit ! I am an ex-industry architect and a startup CEO who came back to academia started this effort because the pvt sector was moving too slowly wrt CPU research and deployment. Done well govt entities can move really fast once you figure out how to deal with bureaucracy. And we can dream way bigger.

Thank you for the effort to free knowledge.

That is a compliment I will gladly accept. Look I come from a long line of theologians and philosophers dating back a millenia plus . The Indian ethos of not charging for knowledge has prevailed this long and I am not about to break a tradition ! It is not that we are averse to the ways of capitalism, folks from my family have funded and run some of the biggest tech startups in the valley. I have also run startups earlier and am incubating a couple now. So I know what free money implies. But the core ethos of Shakti is openness and that will never change. See my other effort - finlibre.org. Open source in banking and insurance.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#79

Post by xelxebar »

gsmadhusudan wrote: post #30

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…

> 3. The CPU eco-system including ARM's is a bit sclerotic.

Silly question, but what do you mean by "sclerotic" here? I had to look up the word and only found medical definitions.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#80

Post by retailbuyout »

0xbear wrote: post #7
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

My understanding is that you also need to license from intel if you have a chip.
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