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

pib.gov.in

21–30 of 73 posts

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

#21

Quoted post unavailable.

It's a modern website in brutalist web style. Looks perfect.

I think it's meant to be embedded in the main site, perhaps using this URL:

https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetail.aspx?PRID=1820621

Looks dated, but not that brutalist in that format...

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

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How so? Who is going to rewrite decades worth of software to run on linux?

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

#23
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…

If 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.

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

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many departments in Indian govt using CentOS

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

#25
post #9

IIRC 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?

Shakti website mentions using Ada language which is better for embedded development. Govt.'s focus right now seems Agriculture and similar industries

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

#26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How so? Who is going to rewrite decades worth of software to run on linux?

Win7 software tends to run quite well in Wine. Of course some things like document/spreadsheet macros are more problematic, but those are not that common and can be rewritten.

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

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If 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…

Decode 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...

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

#28
post #9

IIRC 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?

Shakti website mentions using Ada language which is better for embedded development. Govt.'s focus right now seems Agriculture and similar industries

Then they should totally make an Ada extension for RISC-V and replace all those clunky outdated iAPX 432's.

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

#29
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?

Many 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.

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

#30
post #17

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…

Are supercomputers practical, or a vanity project?
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