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Software Hardware Technology

India's First CPUs Are Ready For App Development (tomshardware.com) 142

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has released the software development kit (SDK) for its open-source Shakti processor. Shakti is based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture and was funded by the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The institute promised that a development board will also be released soon. Tom's Hardware reports: The RISE group at IIT Madras started working on the Shakti project in 2016 with a plan to release a family of six classes of processors, each serving a different market. The group promised that the reference processors will be competitive with commercial offerings in terms of area, performance and power consumption. Now India, like China and the European Union, are showing interest in designing their own processors, rather than relying on ones designed by U.S. manufacturers. With the release of the Shakti SDK, developers can begin to develop applications for the Shakti processors, even before they're commercialized.
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India's First CPUs Are Ready For App Development

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  • Hail India (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's better the keep these tech in own hands. You never know when the yankees will threaten to put your companies into the blacklist.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Archtech ( 159117 )

      Moreover, there is much to be said in favour of standard, moderately powerful processors. Today extra speed comes at a significant cost in electrical power and heat - both of which worsen pollution and resource depletion.

      Intel has just presented us with a magnificent picture of the terrible damage a company can do to itself by chasing to enthusiastically after performance gains.

      Far better to accept chips with adequate speed, low cost and reasonable power and heat characteristics. Most efficiency gains come

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Most efficiency gains come from software

        What are you smoking?

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Compare the speed of execution of some Ruby code versus Rust code that does the same task.

          Ruby code tends to have a lot of overhead due to having far too many pointless abstractions. More of the CPU is consumed doing relatively useless work.

          Rust code tends to be ultra fast, because it has just the right amount of abstraction. It uses the CPU for real work.

          You get a lot more efficient use of a CPU when using Rust instead of Ruby.

          • by Anonymous Coward

            How the hell is that comment at -1? It perfectly demonstrates what user Archtech was referring to with the "Most efficiency gains come from software." statement, using a practical real world example.

            Why are the best comments at /. always wrongly modded down to -1? Why even have a moderation system here if it's so broken that we have to always browse at -1 just to see all of the insightful and informative comments that have been wrongly modded down?

            • It's not a good example, though. Software for which performance mattered wouldn't be written in Ruby in the first place.
              • by Anonymous Coward

                The performance of all software matters.

                If your cloud service is running thousands of VM instances all using a massively inefficient language like Ruby or Python then you are burning a whole lot more power than id they were using C++, D, Rust etc.

                Don't forget folks, using Ruby, Python, etc causes global warming, climate change and the ensuing starvation of millions. How would you like that on your conscience?

            • by lkcl ( 517947 )

              How the hell is that comment at -1? It perfectly demonstrates what user Archtech was referring to with the "Most efficiency gains come from software." statement, using a practical real world example.

              Why are the best comments at /. always wrongly modded down to -1?

              because, sometimes, what's insightful isn't "nice". due to a world perspective, my comments that implicitly criticise US-centric "Imperialist"-style world domination are modded down - by americans - because they're not "nice to americans". this just isn't easy to fix. people hear what they want to hear, and drown out what they don't.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by jwhyche ( 6192 )

              It is because you have a groups of moderators that automatically mod down views and people that don't fit their personal views or beliefs.

              For the people, it doesn't matter if you are wrong or right you are automatically modded down because in the past you have expressed views, that while correct, don't meet with political views or correctness.

              In the past when someone abused their moderation privilege it was revoked. But now there is no effort to correct the system. You just better hope your fans and

              • by Nethead ( 1563 )

                It was a good system, 20 years ago.

                • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

                  20 years ago it was a good system because the people running /. cared about it. A few jealous moderators like to mod me overrated no matter what my post said. Back then those moderators would have lost their mod privileges.

        • What are you smoking?

          Probably Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.

        • Most efficiency gains come from software

          What are you smoking?

          It's an illusion. Normally we all write terrible, inefficiency, and bloated software. On the rare occasion where we stop working on marketing gimmicks and design a real solution we amaze ourselves with concise beautiful software. But it's wrong for us to pat ourselves on the back for doing our fucking jobs once in a while.

      • Re:Hail India (Score:5, Interesting)

        by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @07:09AM (#58866166) Homepage

        Intel has just presented us with a magnificent picture of the terrible damage a company can do to itself by chasing to enthusiastically after performance gains.

        you may be fascinated to know that the "mild register renaming" present in the Shakti Core is the same principle utilised in the CDC 6600 Mainframe, from the 1960s: Q-Tables. this capability of the 6600 is one that is not clear or well-understood. except that Professor Kamakoti, who was the lead unit test engineer working for Intel in the 80s and 90s, came up with the Q-Table system used in the Shakti Core independently (of Seymour Cray and James Thornton).

        also: do you remember how the AMD Opteron processors from the early 2000s had to be quoted with a higher "equivalent" clock number than their "real" one? this was because Mitch Alsup (the creator of the 68000) was the lead design engineer, and he has made a life-long study of the CDC 6600 and is one of the few people in the world who understands it.

        the reason for the higher efficiency of the AMD Opteron was down to the use of unary register encoding (a long bit-string) instead of a binary number representation, within the Dependency "hazard resolution" Matrices. this unary encoding has two highly significant consequences:

        (1) the power savings are enormous. where a CAM has to activate binary XOR comparators in *every single row* of a table, an Unary Matrix activates a single AND gate (per row) to do the same job.

        (2) multi-issue in an Unary Dependency Matrix is dead simple: you just activate *multiple* of those unary bits, accumulating the dependent registers *in a transitive fashion*. instruction 1 just gets the current dependencies. instruction 2 gets the current instruction dependencies *plus* those of instruction 2. instruction 3 gets the dependencies from 1, 2 and 3.

        consequently, Opteron was able to do 50% more instructions per clock, at the same core frequency, despite being on a *lower geometry* than Intel, and they were still power-performant competitive!

        this approach is so simple and so power-efficient it's almost comical. Intel on the other hand followed the Tomasulo Algorithm (invented by IBM in the 1970s). its core concept: a (binary) CAM, baked in to the Reorder Buffer. and it can't do multi-issue: you have to add *yet more* complexity around it, to get that.

        so, now you know _why_ Intel's designs are so power-inefficient: it's just that they're based on an inferior design concept. Intel *could* do a lot better.

        sorry, i've been doing a study of these things, for the Libre RISC-V SoC :) http://libre-riscv.org/3d_gpu/ [libre-riscv.org]

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Wow. Thanks for this one. You made my day.

          Since this is Slashdot: no, not sarcasm. Candid joy.

          • by lkcl ( 517947 )

            Wow. Thanks for this one. You made my day.

            Since this is Slashdot: no, not sarcasm. Candid joy.

            :)

        • Wow, I learnt something new today. Thanks for this. I also have a question for you regarding power efficient. In the past few years i* series has been siginificantly lower in power consumption as compared to comparable AMD processors. Is this solely due to the process used (10nm etc.,)?

        • by Megol ( 3135005 )

          One-hot encoding for CAMs or matrix schedulers isn't exactly new technology?
          Enjoy your posts on comp.arch but this one is mostly baloney: Opteron wasn't able to do 50% more per clock than the concurrent Intel Pentium 4 Northwood and used smaller schedulers to boot. It was a development of the AMD Athlon K7 and the reason it often performed better for legacy code (read: not recompiled for the P4 with the Intel Compiler) was that it didn't penalize some relatively common instructions and instruction patterns

          • by lkcl ( 517947 )

            One-hot encoding for CAMs or matrix schedulers isn't exactly new technology?

            it isn't: it just can't be used in a Tomasulo ROB (i tried). and no, matrix schedulers aren't new: they do however seem to be a lost art. one of the reasons for that seems to be that the academic literature on the 6600 criticises scoreboards for not having "precise" capability. as in, cancellation (rollback) "seems not to be possible" leaving the register file "damaged" on an exception, because instructions *after* the exception were "permitted" to write.

            this is horseshit.

            an augmentation designed by mitc

        • by kbahey ( 102895 )

          Just wanted to say that this is valuable historical information on how it influences CPUs that are in use today. Thanks man.

        • Thanks. Amusingly enough, I learned to program on a CDC 6600.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Too late. The RISC-V is an American (UC Berkeley) designed architecture and the foundation is based in San Francisco.

  • by Chrontius ( 654879 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @06:16AM (#58865986)
    Always thought that RISC-V needed more love.
  • first boot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @06:54AM (#58866092) Homepage

    i was there last year when they did the first boot when the 22nm test chips came back from the Intel Foundry - the roar from the team was awesome. eighteen months of hard work, doing FPGA and other simulations, and a team that had never worked together before on such a major project, their not just first silicon, their *first ever* silicon worked *first time*. that's a stunning achievement.

    to put this properly into perspective: this is India's first ever home-grown 64-bit processor, and the core design is capable of being expanded from single-core lowly "embedded" right the way to a full monster multi-core VLIW Beast. India now joins very few other countries in the world - China, USA and.. err... i really can't think of any others - that have full SOVEREIGN control over the computing devices running within their borders.

    that means, for example, ooo.... that the ageing Motorola 68000s running the Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors can be replaced with something that they trust, and Mossad will not be able to do a SCADA (Stuxnet) attack against them like they did to Iran, causing a meltdown.

    when i left they were discussing doing a dual layout of a new Industrial QFP chip, using software libre ASIC layout tools *and* proprietary ones, side-by-side, to do a 180nm low-cost 64-bit variant (to be taped out at a local foundry under Sovereign Control within India's borders). the reason for using libre ASIC layout tools: the India Department of Defense does not want any opportunity for proprietary software from foreign Corporations to compromise the ASICs.

    their plans over the coming years include creating commercial WIFI, 3G and LTE ICs, Server-grade multi-core multi-issue designs, mobile-class processors and much more, all developed and manufactured *in* India, upgrading their Foundries in the process, in order to make them not just for Sovereign use: they'll be designed to be price-competitive not only for use within infrastructure equipment and smartphones within their own borders, but for sale to the rest of the world as well.

    so they're not just taking on ARM and Intel: they're taking on Global Foundries, Intel Foundries, TSMC and CSMC as well. the irony is: much of the core expertise that went into the development of those Foundries came from people *in india*!

    this is just the beginning: it's really exciting, and i'll be cheering for them, all the way. they've started on a process that will give the Silicon ASIC industry (which is borderline cartelled) the arse-kicking it truly deserves.

    • their *first ever* silicon worked *first time*. that's a stunning achievement.

      I'm sure that ARM people are chuckling now. ;)

      • by lkcl ( 517947 )

        their *first ever* silicon worked *first time*. that's a stunning achievement.

        I'm sure that ARM people are chuckling now. ;)

        they should have tried to bribe neel to go work for them with waaaay more than 6 figures :)

      • by Anonymous Coward

        ARM should be quaking in it's boots.

        It's era of rent collecting on processor designs is coming to an end.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      that have full SOVEREIGN control over the computing devices running within their borders

      How exactly do you define that?

      The UK has, or rather had ARM, it's Japanese now. Japan has been making CPUs for decades though, some under licence and some home grown designs like the Hitachi ones. Their 8088 licenced designs were sought after back in the day, because they were cheap and faster than the Intel ones.

      • by lkcl ( 517947 )

        that have full SOVEREIGN control over the computing devices running within their borders

        How exactly do you define that?

        The UK has, or rather had ARM, it's Japanese now. Japan has been making CPUs for decades though, some under licence and some home grown designs like the Hitachi ones. Their 8088 licenced designs were sought after back in the day, because they were cheap and faster than the Intel ones.

        i couldn't think of any that were still popular. i'd forgotten that Japan's industry now runs on PowerPC... except that PowerPC isn't manufactured *in* Japan itself. that was the point: there's only three countries in the world that design *and* manufacture *popular* mass-volume CPUs:

        * Intel (designed in USA, fabbed in USA)
        * AMD (designed in USA, fabbed with TSMC or GlobalFoundries, neither of which are in the USA)
        * China (ICT Loongson aka Godson - a MIPS64 clone)
        * India (Shakti Core, soon to be fabbed in

        • by kmike ( 31752 )

          Russia does not really count because Baikal's home-grown core is an ARM core. it wasn't *designed* in Russia, although it was taped-out on a Russia fab.

          Wrong. Baikal-T1 uses MIPS: http://www.cpu-world.com/news_... [cpu-world.com]
          Though you can rightfully argue it's not fully Russian as it uses a commercial core. "Elbrus" line of CPUs, however, is fully "home-grown": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
          I guess "Elbrus' does fall under "designed in Russia", right?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I say congrats for developing their own domestic industry.

      I wish America had enough pride to design and manufacture our chips at home.

      But we're so obsessed with growing profits we can't keep our own people employed in highly skilled jobs, we had to ship our jobs to India, China and elsewhere so profits could grow.

      Now on slashdot we're butthurt and surprised the people we exploited have shunned our top heavy management structures and are doing the same work, but for themselves.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      and Mossad will not be able to do a SCADA (Stuxnet) attack against them

      Produced in a US fab. Mossad probably already has some prototypes to do development on.

    • Last I checked, India had one 6", 180nm fab [wikipedia.org] run by its government's space organization. Thatr's not competitive with any major foundry these days.

      Could an Indian company start its own cutting-edge wafer foundry capable of turning out competitive CPUs for the world market? Sure! All they need is a few years $15-20 billion worth of investment...

      Also, though Stuxnet was an amazing piece of engineering, to the best of my knowledge it never caused a meltdown, or even close to it, merely destroy some of Iran's Uranium-enrichment centrifuges. Also, I fail to see what circumstances would lead Israel to attack India's infrastructure (as opposed to Pakistan).

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Of course, the problem is that the chip foundry isn't under their control. So the chip they received may not be quite the chip they designed.

    • by jon3k ( 691256 )

      i was there last year when they did the first boot when the 22nm test chips came back from the Intel Foundry

      That's really awesome, I'm sure they must have been over the moon. I'm surprised more countries aren't developing their own microprocessors to be honest.

      that means, for example, ooo.... that the ageing Motorola 68000s running the Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors can be replaced with something that they trust, and Mossad will not be able to do a SCADA (Stuxnet) attack against them like they did to Iran, causing a meltdown.

      Are you suggesting that India will replace SCADA with something homegrown? Do you think that will make it LESS likely to be susceptible to attacks? Because I would think the opposite would be true? Also, forgive my ignorance, but why would the Mossad want to attack India?

      their plans over the coming years include creating commercial WIFI, 3G and LTE ICs, Server-grade multi-core multi-issue designs, mobile-class processors and much more, all developed and manufactured *in* India, upgrading their Foundries in the process, in order to make them not just for Sovereign use: they'll be designed to be price-competitive not only for use within infrastructure equipment and smartphones within their own borders, but for sale to the rest of the world as well.

      I'm fascinated by projects like this. I think owning and developing these technolo

  • FPGA (Score:5, Informative)

    by Meneth ( 872868 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @07:08AM (#58866162)

    Not obvious from the article: there are no physical Shakti processors available yet.

    As of July 2019, users are required to have a Xilinx FPGA board, compile the Shakti processor schematics from Verilog source code to RTL bit-patterns and load that RTL onto the FPGA.

    • by lkcl ( 517947 )

      Not obvious from the article: there are no physical Shakti processors available yet.

      it's not mentioned in the article: it was mentioned in the submission i did last year (i was there when they did the first boot), they do have actual 22nm silicon, from a Multi-Vendor (MVP) Test Run. it's just that they're so rare, they'll be prioritising giving them out to their sponsors, first. when the dust settles they'll be able to do a production run.

    • Re:FPGA (Score:4, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @09:01AM (#58866542) Homepage Journal

      Apparently they do have silicon: https://www.thehindu.com/sci-t... [thehindu.com]

      Made by Intel at their fab in the US. Well, I suppose maybe that doesn't meet your definition of "available", as it was only a run of 300 so presumably not many people have access to them.

  • If the new processors take on smartphones, IoT, and low end computers, consumers world wide will benefit. India makes, mostly, good stuff at great prices. I expect these chips to be today's equivalent of what Cyrix CPU's were to Intel, almost 30 years ago, functional and cheap, but lacking in performance.
  • There are no US chip manufacturers this would be competing with. Lucian Armasu is just your typical anti-American moron.

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Seriously? None? Not Qualcomm, AMD, AppliedMicro, Broadcom, Apple ... nobody?

      (Admittedly, those are all ARM licensees, so your mileage on the phrase "designed by U.S. manufacturers" may vary.)

  • by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @11:41AM (#58867462)

    Many fellow /dotters are saying that this implementation in particular (and RISC-V in general) can scale to server grade processors.

    While this design could escale to high performance (and I hope it does), or even supercomputing grade, in this day and age, the year of our lord 2019, a processor can not be considered server grade until it supports virtualization in some way shape or form, and RISC-V has just pre-defined the instructions to allow virtualization (we are more or less at the V0.01 spec), let alone those bein implemented in any physical processor.

    https://content.riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Tue0942-riscv-hypervisor-waterman.pdf

    Do not get me wrong, I hope RISC-V takes off, and we get a free as in speech processor (RISC-V is MIT, IIRC), and more architecture options in the market to boot (like in the hacylon days of X-86, AMD64, Itanium, Alpha, Transmeta, Cyrix, Centaur, MIPS, SPARK, ARM, POWER), but there is still a long way to go, until we get a server grade RISC-V part....

  • Thats a good news actually. I came to know here only.
  • Turning this into a celebration of the technical prowess of India is disingenuous. Computer technology is a multi-national multi-decade worldwide effort. No single country deserves credit for any specific slice of computing technology.

    Both IBM and Intel have computer development labs all over the globe. Some Intel processors came from designs done in Israel. ARM started as a research project in England. The code breaking machines at Bletchley Park started as a project in Poland before the Germans invaded.

    • by lkcl ( 517947 )

      Flag waving about the nationality of this work is a waste of mental resources.

      if that's what was being done, i would agree.

      RISC-V is about Open Source Hardware no matter where it happens.

      this is not well understood: RISC-V is *not* "Open". it's *believed* to be open, because there are so many "open" implementations, and there is *access* (unrestricted access) to the specifications.

      sadly, the reality is: it's turning into an abusive arrangement, and a Cartel. the innovation (extension and standards development) takes place behind *closed doors*, using ITU-style standards development practices.

      try getting *actively involved* in the standards deve

      • As far as I can tell you are just making crap up. Name one person who has been booted from any RISC-V activity.

        I smell sour grapes. You, or someone you know, acted badly with respect to the RISC-V protocols and got in trouble. Now you are making slanderous charges.

        Grow up. Your whining is annoying the adults present.

  • You buy some Indian tech. A lot of us do.
    Now instead of Microsoft Support....

    Hi, I'm Apu from India. You bought our super smart buster device. We can tell it's malfunctioning. Please allow us remote access to your controlling household device. Thanks. Now all your files are encrypted and this is ransomware.. Bla ha ha.

  • "Shakti is based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture "

    With how much compatibility? Will binaries that run on Shakti run on RISK-V machines, and vice versa, with or without special accommodation? If with accommodation, will there be a performance penalty? The article doesn't say.

  • From the article, a brief mention of "the T class, which should support object-level security".

    Didn't Intel try this already? A processor that had rather fine-grained memory access permission? It had no assembler. Instead, it had an Ada compiler. And it went nowhere.

    Or perhaps that is just a single point of similarity, and not especially relevant.

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Intel+iAPX432

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432

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