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India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023

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Re: India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023

#11

Post by IceWreck »

ramshanker wrote: post #5

Once 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 .

I 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.

Re: India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023

#12

Post by zozbot234 »

IceWreck wrote: post #11
ramshanker wrote: post #5

Once 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 .

I 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…

> 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.

Re: India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023

#15

Post by unmole »

IceWreck wrote: post #11
ramshanker wrote: post #5

Once 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 .

I 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…

If the government makes a political decision, it can and does browbeat PSUs into compliance. There will be a lot of teething troubles and loss of productivity. But the thing is it won't matter for PSUs, nobody expects them to be highly efficient. I remember reading years ago that IDBI (A quasi-PSU Bank) switched to Linux for their terminals. The core banking for most Indian banks is powered by Finacle on Linux.

Re: India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023

#16

Post by acd10j »

ramshanker wrote: post #5

Once 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 .

And this will give government departments one more excuse to not deilver on time, Computer is not working or too slow.

Re: India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023

#17

Post by qiskit »

Hopefully 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

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.

Re: India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023

#18

Post by mhh__ »

slimsag wrote: post #6

As 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?

In 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.

Re: India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023

#19

Post by socialdemocrat »

slimsag wrote: post #6

As 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?

RISC-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.

Re: India reveals RISC-V CPU roadmap, expects product by 2023

#20

Post by duskwuff »

slimsag wrote: post #6

As 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?

All 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.
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