India's First CPUs Are Ready for App Development

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/india-shakti-cpu-processors-sdk-risc-v,39781.html

by sbmthakur • 7 years ago

226 33 7 years ago

Iv• 7 years ago

I am surprised this is not a bigger news. This project is open hardware and open source. It may be 180 nm tech, it is still nice to see open hardware being released.

Now I could not find anywhere to buy this processor. Anyone knows about it?

slang8002• 7 years ago

It's not commercially available yet.

p1necone• 7 years ago

180 or 18?

dikei2• 7 years ago

They have 2 prototype: 1 using 22nm, and 1 using 180nm

https://shakti.org.in/tapeouts.html

duncan-donuts• 7 years ago

Based on this article[0] it sounds like there are C class chips made by intel at 22nm and they made some in India at 180nm. I couldn’t find the specs anywhere else, so idk.

http://gareebscientist.com/shakti-processor-vs-intel-vs-arm/

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

This is big news - open hardware backed by a major global power is going to have a real affect - and the fabs don't have to be the 10nm billion dollar versions. If the indian government can start using some muscle here - all government IOT devices must use this processor and this software stack and you can see a global standard emerge from the open standards. I think I might be dreaming too much

_emacsomancer_• 7 years ago

The S class and H class sound interesting, perhaps that they could be used in a desktop/laptop. Earlier discussions of Shakti Processors seemed to suggest that it was all embedded devices.

slang8002• 7 years ago

all government IOT devices must use this processor and this software stack and you can see a global standard emerge from the open standards

Why would India-specific anti-competitive restrictions result in other countries around the world adopting this processor as a standard?

Also, this isn't the first open CPU project. It's based on the RISC-V architecture and there are other RISC-V processors that you can buy today from companies like https://www.sifive.com/.

StudentStuff• 7 years ago

Brazil tried this tariff tactic, which resulted in some middling performance knockoffs. China also has some tariffs (hence the tariff bypass AMD recently did with the JV that rebranded 3 year old Zen for the Chinese market).

In terms of building up internal silicon design talent, tariffs have not been effective in other large countries. Allwinner and Mediatek are taking off the shelf designs from ARM, getting them fabbed, and writing basic BSPs for them. The only magic here is they generally do not care to have large firmware blobs, so their hardware isn't too terrible to mainline.

jrockway• 7 years ago

Good luck to them. A completely open system is my dream. I am looking forward to when the datasheets from $VENDOR are the same for every customer, rather than edited whenever you call in and say "wait, didn't you say XX does YY?" "Oh yeah, it can do that... let me send you a new totally accurate datasheet that you won't spend 3 months debugging for us."

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 7 years ago

I too would like to see completely open hardware at some point. Really open, none of this "it's totally, except for the closed GPU and binary blobs that is..." crap.

pjc503• 7 years ago

How much more are you prepared to pay for that, though?

mepian• 7 years ago

I browsed the SHAKTI repository briefly and found only the E and C cores, are the rest of the cores not open source? Did I miss them?

quantummkv• 7 years ago

They are still under development

peter_beck• 7 years ago

Pity it is implemented in Bluespec Verilog for which the only viable toolchain is still closed source software. Some unsupported since 2013 toy compilers exist. Looks like the company behind the Bluespec pivoted to RISC-V implementation.

Bluespec HDL has seen its limelight in 2012 and died due to it being closed source with pricing similarly excessive as other HDL tools.

I remember being excited about the possibilities of a new, paradigm shifting HDL.

Sadly, now it is a fizzled remainder of how to run the good tech into the ground by keeping it closed.

snaky3• 7 years ago

Fe-Si is a simplified version of Bluespec, an HDL based on a notion of guarded atomic actions. Fe-Si is defined as a dependently typed deep embedding in Coq. The target language of the compiler corresponds to a synthesisable subset of Verilog or VHDL. A key aspect of our approach is that input programs to the compiler can be defined and proved correct inside Coq. Then, we use extraction and a Verilog back-end (written in OCaml) to get a certified version of a hardware design.

http://adam.chlipala.net/papers/FesiCAV13/

https://github.com/braibant/Synthesis

0815test• 7 years ago

I remember being excited about the possibilities of a new, paradigm shifting HDL.

2012 was a long time ago. There are plenty of RISC-V core implementations using Chisel and other "paradigm shifting" HDL tools.

snaky3• 7 years ago

Lava, Esterel, what else?

jabl• 7 years ago

At some point they didn't have the C extension, making them unable to run software compiled for "GC", which is the baseline targeted by most Linux distros. Has this been fixed yet?

pdevr• 7 years ago

Seems easy enough to set up the SDK: https://gitlab.com/shaktiproject/software/shakti-sdk/blob/ma...

India's First CPUs Are Ready for App Development

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