India shows off new home-grown CPU – but at 100MHz, 32-bit and 180nm, it’s a bit of a clunker

erek

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it's pretty efficient for 100MHz

"None of the device’s specs are state-of-the-art. Intel, Arm, Qualcomm and Nvidia will not be quaking in their boots at the prospect of Moushik disrupting their businesses any time soon.

Indeed, the device does not even represent India’s best efforts, as the E-class Shakti core is the architecture’s least-powerful spec. But as the world is going to build IoT devices by the billion, Moushik could yet find an audience, even as a proof of concept.

Even if it only helps to grow India's capacity to build other silicon that's a win, because the device and its motherboard were designed and made in India, which is a step towards the nation’s plan to make electronics manufacturing its top industry and become a big electronics exporter."


https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/24/shakti_moushik_cpu_india/
 
If nothing else I applaud their efforts, of the recent trends have shown anything it’s instability in China or the US can severely hamper a countries ability to develop or maintain their infrastructure. With the current state of the China/India relations I can’t blame them for wanting to get a home grown tech & process in place.
 
If nothing else I applaud their efforts, of the recent trends have shown anything it’s instability in China or the US can severely hamper a countries ability to develop or maintain their infrastructure. With the current state of the China/India relations I can’t blame them for wanting to get a home grown tech & process in place.
impressed at all?
 
impressed at all?
Haven’t looked at it enough yet, I’m not terribly up to speed on Risc-V so with out putting more sober research into it than I would normally plan for a Friday evening I can’t tell.
 
Haven’t looked at it enough yet, I’m not terribly up to speed on Risc-V so with out putting more sober research into it than I would normally plan for a Friday evening I can’t tell.
try this:

 
it's pretty efficient for 100MHz

"None of the device’s specs are state-of-the-art. Intel, Arm, Qualcomm and Nvidia will not be quaking in their boots at the prospect of Moushik disrupting their businesses any time soon.

Indeed, the device does not even represent India’s best efforts, as the E-class Shakti core is the architecture’s least-powerful spec. But as the world is going to build IoT devices by the billion, Moushik could yet find an audience, even as a proof of concept.

Even if it only helps to grow India's capacity to build other silicon that's a win, because the device and its motherboard were designed and made in India, which is a step towards the nation’s plan to make electronics manufacturing its top industry and become a big electronics exporter."


https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/24/shakti_moushik_cpu_india/

Well it's a start I guess. Plus Intel/AMD have a ton of Indian engineers so I'm sure those guys could help out Indian homegrown CPU efforts if needed.
 
Well it's a start I guess. Plus Intel/AMD have a ton of Indian engineers so I'm sure those guys could help out Indian homegrown CPU efforts if needed.
I was going to say, stealing IP and having your people educated by the countries whose tech you are going to steal is how Japan and China leapfrogged technologically, I don't see why India wouldn't do the same. Look at Japan's Iwakura mission for example, flooding Western countries with spies, whose success infiltrating government, education, military, industries, etc and was so successful it spawned many more. Lexus went from reverse engineering a Mercedes S-Class to outselling them, so the big four better get a lot more serious about protecting their IP unless they want to see history repeat itself again in 10 years.
 
I was going to say, stealing IP and having your people educated by the countries whose tech you are going to steal is how Japan and China leapfrogged technologically, I don't see why India wouldn't do the same. Look at Japan's Iwakura mission for example, flooding Western countries with spies, whose success infiltrating government, education, military, industries, etc and was so successful it spawned many more. Lexus went from reverse engineering a Mercedes S-Class to outselling them, so the big four better get a lot more serious about protecting their IP unless they want to see history repeat itself again in 10 years.

At this point Pandora's box is open so there's no putting it back in. IP will continue to flow freely from more developed nations to developing ones until they reach parity and then espionage will ensure a continuous flow back and forth. I don't mind if India gains IP and starts developing indigenous CPUs/GPUs, they already have major design facilities in S. India so the talent is there and they also have a metric fuck ton of expatriates that are highly educated. It won't take them too long to catch up I think.
 
Better they develop a homegrown industry than outsource those grown in their home to international industries.

Only product I have bought that knowingly came from India was a shirt. At least this is a start.
 
Better they develop a homegrown industry than outsource those grown in their home to international industries.

Well outsourcing is the engine for growth. Those same people who go abroad can eventually come home and lend that expertise to the fledgling industries back in India and speed up their development. This is a good article: https://techstartups.com/2020/02/07/rise-silicon-valley-india-india-becoming-next-silicon-valley/ I remember growing up in the late 80s/early 90s where immigrant Indians were made fun of as being "cab drivers" or 7-11 shop owners and now those immigrants kids are known as high tech engineers and doctors--quite a rapid success story in one generation both in the US and in India.
 
At this point Pandora's box is open so there's no putting it back in. IP will continue to flow freely from more developed nations to developing ones until they reach parity and then espionage will ensure a continuous flow back and forth. I don't mind if India gains IP and starts developing indigenous CPUs/GPUs, they already have major design facilities in S. India so the talent is there and they also have a metric fuck ton of expatriates that are highly educated. It won't take them too long to catch up I think.
And what are the 1.4 billion and rapidly growing people going to do with their newly found power parity when they see those developed countries have more than them? One of the first things Japan did when it reached an industrial and military threshold was to surprise attack two Western countries it had previously infiltrated and stolen from, Russia and the US. China's maritime aggression is rapidly increasing and as they start cranking out more aircraft carriers, it seems inevitable that they will soon challenge the US's naval dominance protecting SE Asia and especially Taiwan. Unfortunately, Western governments and businesses are too short sighted with individuals governed by short-term personal gain to concern themselves with the ramifications of this... more outsourcing, more IP loss, all that matters is their income and their quarterly results.
 
And what are the 1.4 billion and rapidly growing people going to do with their newly found power parity when they see those developed countries have more than them? One of the first things Japan did when it reached an industrial and military threshold was to surprise attack two Western countries it had previously infiltrated and stolen from, Russia and the US. China's maritime aggression is rapidly increasing and as they start cranking out more aircraft carriers, it seems inevitable that they will soon challenge the US's naval dominance protecting SE Asia and especially Taiwan. Unfortunately, Western governments and businesses are too short sighted with individuals governed by short-term personal gain to concern themselves with the ramifications of this... more outsourcing, more IP loss, all that matters is their income and their quarterly results.

I agree to an extent, most nations when they reach a technological apex start having expansionist desires to continue to fuel their growth. But at this point there's just no stopping it.
 
And what are the 1.4 billion and rapidly growing people going to do with their newly found power parity when they see those developed countries have more than them? One of the first things Japan did when it reached an industrial and military threshold was to surprise attack two Western countries it had previously infiltrated and stolen from, Russia and the US. China's maritime aggression is rapidly increasing and as they start cranking out more aircraft carriers, it seems inevitable that they will soon challenge the US's naval dominance protecting SE Asia and especially Taiwan. Unfortunately, Western governments and businesses are too short sighted with individuals governed by short-term personal gain to concern themselves with the ramifications of this... more outsourcing, more IP loss, all that matters is their income and their quarterly results.
PRC has very little capability to project power. Their strength is in their overwhelming numbers of ballistic missiles that would easily overwhelm any power the US projected within the third island chain.

Only Russia has any capability for sustainment/transport on a global scale, although it’s not nearly at the scale the US is capable of doing.
 
"None of the device’s specs are state-of-the-art. Intel, Arm, Qualcomm and Nvidia will not be quaking in their boots at the prospect of Moushik disrupting their businesses any time soon.
see-that-was-5be939.png
 
PRC has very little capability to project power. Their strength is in their overwhelming numbers of ballistic missiles that would easily overwhelm any power the US projected within the third island chain.

Only Russia has any capability for sustainment/transport on a global scale, although it’s not nearly at the scale the US is capable of doing.
This won't be the case forever though, the Feds have dropped the ball on the new carrier and they quit making C-17, there is no planned replacement for C5, you need notice to have operational LCACs for an exercise, lots of it if you need more than a few, I could go on and on. How about the submarine maintenance backlog...?
 
Floored to see any report from The Register. Didn't they shut down a while back?
Something smells off about the editing. No mention of the word "Boffin" even once.

That'd be like the Weekly World News without Ed Anger getting "Pig Bitin' Mad".
Or when Joe Bob Briggs forgets to mention "Mush Mouthed French Fry Heads."
Does not compute...
 
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I think the P1-75 that is had eons ago would run circles around this. Not sure how to compare them, so I may be wrong.

This is a testament to just how bad and regressed that some countries are, even the ones with massive populations.
 
They built a microprocessor by themselves. That’s huge no matter how slow it is. Are they behind the west? Absolutely. Will they catch up over time? Absolutely.
 
They built a microprocessor by themselves. That’s huge no matter how slow it is. Are they behind the west? Absolutely. Will they catch up over time? Absolutely.

Yeah they also have their Shakti processors which are already up and running: https://shakti.org.in/processors.html They will eventually catch up, India’s come far in a short time. I don’t look at it as a threat like some do, the more choices we have the better.

They’re also already designing modern GPUs: https://hothardware.com/news/intel-raja-koduri-teases-xe-high-performance-discrete-gpu
 
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I couldn't find any benchmarks.. I wonder if Doom could be ported to it and what the performance would be like.
 
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The more the better, even though that chip is barely faster than a Sega Genesis.
Dude, no - even being facetious, that statement is too over exaggerated.
The Motorola 68000 CPU from 1979 in the Genesis wasn't even clocked at the full 8MHz it was rated for, and this is a RISC-V 100MHz CPU from 2020.

Worst case, this RISC-V CPU would be similar in performance to a Motorola 68060 or Intel Pentium, give or take a few clock cycles in general performance (and realistically, probably crushes those by an order of magnitude).
 
Dude, no - even being facetious, that statement is too over exaggerated.
The Motorola 68000 CPU from 1979 in the Genesis wasn't even clocked at the full 8MHz it was rated for, and this is a RISC-V 100MHz CPU from 2020.

Worst case, this RISC-V CPU would be similar in performance to a Motorola 68060 or Intel Pentium, give or take a few clock cycles in general performance (and realistically, probably crushes those by an order of magnitude).
So it could definitely play Doom?
 
If the code for Doom was ported to it, most definitely and easily.
Sorry, I was mostly trolling when I said that. My guess is this is probably much more comparable to the 200MHz chip in the Dreamcast than the ancient 68000 in the Genesis - would that be a closer comparison?

Edit - just trolling about Doom. Wasn't the original Sega Genesis poster.
 
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Sorry, I was mostly trolling when I said that. My guess is this is probably much more comparable to the 200MHz chip in the Dreamcast than the ancient 68000 in the Genesis - would that be a closer comparison?
That would be a much better comparison for general-purpose performance.
 
For a RiscV implementation built from scratch on a home grown fab process good show solid starting point. Definitely a win for a proof of concept, give it a few years and I could see some uses for this outside of a lab.
 
Dude, no - even being facetious, that statement is too over exaggerated.
The Motorola 68000 CPU from 1979 in the Genesis wasn't even clocked at the full 8MHz it was rated for, and this is a RISC-V 100MHz CPU from 2020.

Worst case, this RISC-V CPU would be similar in performance to a Motorola 68060 or Intel Pentium, give or take a few clock cycles in general performance (and realistically, probably crushes those by an order of magnitude).
That statement was me trolling. RISC-V is something to pay attention to for the future but for now the performance isn't that great compared to ARM and modern X86. I think Nvidia is even involved with RISC-V but after their purchase of ARM I can't imagine Nvidia sticking with RISC-V for much longer. RISC-V needs a major performance boost to get it anywhere near modern CPU's.

 
100 MHz, man that brings me back in time, I remember my first computer "PC-clone" was a 66 MHz computer that didn't even require a heatsink, I think by the time the 100MHz rolled around they did require them just no fan, and thank god because as fans started to get required manufacturers thought "small is better" and the annoying whine from them...
 
That statement was me trolling. RISC-V is something to pay attention to for the future but for now the performance isn't that great compared to ARM and modern X86. I think Nvidia is even involved with RISC-V but after their purchase of ARM I can't imagine Nvidia sticking with RISC-V for much longer. RISC-V needs a major performance boost to get it anywhere near modern CPU's.


I gotcha, and my sentiments exactly.
Who knows, if ARM goes the way of x86 in another 20 years, maybe RISC-V will be the new ARM?
 
India can now go to space, dive the deep seas, and build nukes. So much of that stuff in leading nations is still running on rugged 486 processors that top out at 75MHz.
 
Just to be clear:
E-class[edit]
The E-class is 32/64 bit microcontrollers capable of supporting all extensions of RISC-V ISA, aimed at low-power and low compute applications. The E-class is an In-order 3 stage pipeline having an operational frequency of less than 200 MHz on silicon. It is positioned against ARM’s M-class (CorTex-M series) cores.

This is not a high performance cpu. It's like critizing how slow the arm cortex m-series is, or giving ARM a pat on the back for a good first try (hint: arm cortex m are not fast, they have been around for a while, and they are good for real-time work). BTW, many arm cortex-m processors run below 100MHz.
 
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RISC-V is something to pay attention to for the future but for now the performance isn't that great compared to ARM and modern X86.

This specific implementation by India states it's built around a 3 stage, in order pipeline. So yes that certainly isn't going to lend itself well to general computing. This is one of those things where a specialized workload could show it's competitive based on some metric like perf / w, but obviously that just won't be the case if the process nodes are not equal. 180nm is like Athlon XP days, (Palomino circa 2001 for reference) so they are basically just testing the waters with 20 year old nodes. I wonder if they simply were able to get their hands on some old fab equipment that was no longer being used, so it was a great way to build something that is of a very low cost.

I'm not sure if gate count = transistor count, but if it does then that would put it somewhere between an 80386 and an 80486, but with higher clocks than either of those. But outside of that it's such a mash up of specs it's really hard to say how these processors would compare. Those old CPUs could only have like 1 - 8KB of L1 cache, where this chip from India could probably get away with like 64KB L1 cache and not be overly costly. That could make a huge difference in what type of instructions you can run on it, so it's really hard to say what workloads it excels at, and what other ones it really struggles with. (I would say anything AVX is out the window, so I don't think anything multimedia would probably run well if at all on one of these)

I definitely don't know enough about architectures to even speculate much, but I'd imagine these chips are likely fast enough for what they were designed for. If you really want your coffee pot to be able to send malware, err, I mean connect to your smartphone then these are probably something that could be built in high volume very cheaply for something like that.
 
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