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.
Resisting mass immigration to leach from your welfare state is not xenophobic.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
IIRC one of those homegrown Chinese HPC chips were rumored to more or less use the Alpha ISA. That being said, I wonder if at this point all the low level software (kernels, toolchains etc.) have bitrotted to the point that you're not buying much, if anything, compared to using RISC-V. And it's not like Alpha doesn't have those irritating ISA idiosyncrasies. E.g. the most crazily relaxed memory model known to man. No…
Regarding the big-endian nature of it: kinda, but also kinda not. Network endianness is generally big, so it'd work well in those instance without needing to do any juggling. Plus (speaking from experience many decades ago on the 68k) reading big-endian memory was so much easier that trying to decipher things in a hex editor on ix86. Though, granted, this is both apocryphal and a minor thing to worry about.
You'd be surprised how many workloads end up spending large amounts of time in memcmp / strcmp. The chief advantage of big-endianness is that a 64-bit read is already in the order necessary for strcmp or memcmp. This means you don't need specialized instructions for fast strcmp / memcmp. Though, I would guess in a pipelined implementation with good pre-fetch logic, you'll usually not pay any time penalty (and only a single instruction in size penalty) for a byte order swap instruction in the middle of strcmp / memcmp.
> And DEC alpha. I really wish all these "open source" chips would just steal the DEC Alpha microarchitecture and implement it. It's been almost 20 years--even the patents on EV7 should have run out by now. It was a really clean, mostly orthogonal microarchitecture that had most of the really annoying implementation corners filed down. EV5 is a very straightforward chip and maps very well to low power implementations…
That's what some people were doing with SuperH; I don't know how the project has progressed. https://lwn.net/Articles/647636/ [If you wanted to resurrect the Alpha, though, please do not resurrect the crazy memory consistency semantics, where you need to put a full memory barrier between r0 = load(&x); r1 = load(r0);
Do you have any pointers to good documentation on the Alpha memory semantics?
The memory semantics are of course so lax so that the processor doesn't need to check the computed addresses of all in-flight stores before issuing a concurrent memory operation. My understanding is that it's mostly a footgun for assembly programmers, but I'd love to see any estimates of the speed and power efficiency benefits of the lax memory semantics.
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…
Of course any new venture has high probability of failure. However, But India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba... Flipkart last week announced a Designed and engineered in India Smartphone [1]. And this was done by a homegrown company smartron.com. Their website shows how heavily invested they are…
Thanks for pointing this out. I was much too cynical in the above post.
Sure, except immigrants under work visas are not entitled to any welfare such as unemployment/medical - in fact we lose our status as legal immigrants as soon as we become unemployed so we must leave the country. Keep the hate flowing though. I don't have any objections to a country looking out for its own interest, resisting illegal immigration or immigrants that otherwise cannot contribute much to the economy, but…
> the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide your welfare state is not the world model e.g. Germany Sees Welfare Benefit Costs More Than Double Asylum seekers received nearly $5.91 billion in welfare benefits in 2015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-welfare-bill-rises-169... and your assessment of employment rates among legal immigrants in Europe is simply not borne out by the statistics https://www.economist.com/n…
If you read my comment, I was talking about restrictions on WORK visas in the US, not refugees in Europe.
http://iglc2018.com/images/iit/4.jpg https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2200d147343aa841a43a07... http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OgX4b2N9a8E/S7OVv7jxhmI/AAAAAAAAAh... 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. T…
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!
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.
Also everyone is welcome to review our code and to contribute to the codebase. It is an open source project. IIT-M incubated it but we want it to be community driven. FPGA based dev packages should be announced by jan , based on standard low cost FPGA boards. Dev parts based on ASIC parts will probably be announced 2nd quarter of next year assuming Feb/March tapeout.We would be glad to help other universities do thei…
Congratulation on the project. Where can one find the source? Is this the one? https://bitbucket.org/casl/shakti_public
Yes, we will update the C Class next month since our private line has a lot of foundry specific code that needs to be removed. The I class needs more work but the design is in place. It will also move to quad issue and would be a Cortex A72/75 class core. More importantly the basic slow IPs, UART, I2C, quad/Octal SPI, SDRAM controller, JTAG, DMA, PLIC will be FPGA and silicon proven and production quality. Will be very useful to other developers (non RISC-V also) as would the AXI bus.
I'm not sure why pedroaraujo is being downvoted other than in response to his criticism of HN topcommenter Chuck McManis. Pedro is correct; toy CPUs , like what Chuck mentioned building, are so trivial that undergraduate students can build functioning models of them in a few days or hours. They are quite literally thousands of times less complex than the CPUs (even RISC arches) that are discussed in the article. I al…
It seems both of you haven't read the article itself. The new CPU design is not about high-end CPU you expect from Intel or AMD. It is about CPUs for the IoT. We are talking about Cortex-M alike CPUs you find in micro-controllers from Infineon, NXP, Renesas, and alike. BTW there is competition to the ARM design. It is the micro-controllers from NXP former Freescale, which have their own CPU design heavily used in aut…
I am not sure where we have indicated that the focus is only on IoT class cores. The E and C class are aimed at that segment and this segment probably will account for the vast majority of cores shipped. So they are the first ones to be shipped. The I class for example, an early version which is on-line will be a full OO core - quad issue - dual threaded.Server, HPC and vector based cores are equally important for us. The core road-map is clearly outlined on the codeline.
Rust support is getting better. Our Rust OS is lower priority but it is needed for our tagged ISA support since we need language extensions to add security semantics to pointers. Also Rust is a much safer language. We need all this since safety critical systems is a key Shakti target.
Is this similar to the stuff lowrisc is doing?
Yes, we are also collaborating with them. The HW is the simpler problem to solve. SW life-cycle for creating tags, embedding them in the code and ensuring that teh binary has not been tampered is the challenge and to ensure portable tag semantics. We have a dedicated security group working on it. Unlike US universities we have carte blanche for hiring faculty and scholarships for MS/PhD. Funding is not the issue, getting good faculty and students is ! Some of you should head over here for an MS or PhD.
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 ea…
I hold that there is no incompatibility between charity and capitalism. The market is an emergent behaviour of the personal desires and values of individuals. There's nothing anti-market about wanting to contribute to a public good voluntarily, nor to taking work that is ideologically more attractive to you (even at reduced pay).
It is not charity. Computing has become a public infrastructure like roads and water supply. So it is by nature a public good. The underlying foundation has to be based on the principle of the commons and not controlled by one entity. In processors just an ISA will not do, there needs to be open and state of the art implementations at every segment. That is the goal of Shakti. For example We also have GPS/NAVIC receivers and LTE modems in the works. Our comm research groups are far large than our compute groups, so no manpower shortage. They in fact came up with a short lived WiMax like standard which saw wide deployment via IIT incubated startups.
