An ARM killer from IIT-M?
As the lead architect of Shakti and the guy who helped kick-start the project, I figure I am owed my 2 cents !1. We never positioned it as an ARM killer ! That was the imagination of the reporter who wrote the article.2. Shakti is not a state only project. Parts of Shakti are funded by the govt, these relate to cores and SoCs needed by the Govt. The defense and strategic sector procurement is huge, runs in the 10s of billions of USD.There is significant funding in terms of manpower, tools and free foundry shuttles provided by the private sector. In fact Shakti has more traction with the private sector than the govt sector in terms of immediate deployments.3. The CPU eco-system including ARM's is a bit sclerotic. It is not the lic cost that is the problem, it is the inherent lack of flexibility in the model.4. Shakti is not only a CPU. Other components include  a new interconnect based on SRIO, GenZ with our extensions accompanied by open source silicon, a new NVMe+ based storage standard again based on open source SSD controller silicon (using Shakti cores of course), open source Rust based MK OS for supporting tagged ISAs for secure Shakti variants, fault tolerant variants for aerospace and ADAS applications, ML/AI accelerators based on our AI research (we are one of the top RL ML labs around).
4. the Shakti program will also deliver a whole host of IPs including the smaller trivial ones and also as needed bigger blocks like SRIO, PCIe and DDR4. All open source of course.
5. We are also doing our own 10G and 25G PHYs
6. A few startups will come out of this but that can wait till we have a good open source base.
7. The standard cores coming out of IIT will be production grade and not research chips.And building a processor is still tough these days. Try building a 16 core, quad wide server monster with 4 DDR4 channels, 4x25G I/O ports, 2 ports for multi-socket support. All connected via a power optimized mesh fabric. Of course you have to develop the on-chip and off-chip cache coherency stuff too !
8. And yes we are in talks with AMD for using the EPYC socket. But don't think they will bite.Just ignore the India bit and look at what Shakti aims to achieve, then you will get a better picture.
I have no idea how successful we will be and I frankly do not care. What we will achieve (and have to some extent already) is
- create a critical mass of CPU architects in India
- create a concept to fab eco-system ind India for designing any class of CPUs
- add a good dose of practical CPU design knowhow into the engineering curriculum
- become one of the top 5 CPU arch labs aroundShakti is already going into production. The first design is actually in the control system of an experimental civilian nuclear reactor. IIT is within the fallout zone so you can be sure we will get the design right. If you want any further info, mail me. My email is on the Shakti site.
G S Madhusudan