Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

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Glad to hear that they'll be taping out one of the Shakti chips so soon. Can't wait to see what comes of the higher-end server (or workstation, if you're me) chips.

That said...

> “The capitalist computing bourgeoisie want to enslave us all with proprietary processing architectures, but the proletariat eventually produces its own processor alternative – an ISA for and by the people, where instruction sets aren’t subject to the whim of the royalty-driven class, and where licensing fees don’t oppress the workers’ BOMs (bill of materials),” writes Kevin Morris in the Electronics Engineering journal, lending colour and gravitas to what’s at stake in the processor industry.

Comparing RISC-V to communism is pretty grody. RISC-V is precisely a capitalist revolution, shedding a layer of state protection of the ISA from the market, and unleashing the greed, passion, and proprietary zeal of the world on the task of bringing designs to market.

RISC-V was developed by the state, in particular, by UC Berkeley, a public school. And IIT Madras is also another public school. So again, a branch of the Indian state is developing this Shakti processor.

There's really nothing capitalist about this at all.

I'm sure Bluespec, TSMC, SiFive, NXP, Samsung, Qualcomm, Microsemi, Micron, Huawei, and NVIDIA don't think of it like that, the RISC-V foundation is also not UC Berkeley. Also, strictly speaking the UC system ain't the state, if they were, they would not be allowed to generate copyrights from work produced by employees. IBM at least partially (if not completely) covered the fabrication of the original UCB RISC-V chips.

Though I'd generally agree in the case of IIT Madras, which is specifically engaging in a state effort to reduce import dependence in microelectronics (especially for defense and national infrastructure).

Strictly speaking, the UC System is the state. That IBM funded some of RISC-V doesn’t make RISC-V a capitalist product nor does TSMC manufacturing some silicon. The US Government and the University of California can claim intellectual property rights including patents, copyrights and trademarks. That SiFive is incorporated to exploit RISC-V as was Sun Microsystems to exploit 4.2 changes nothing.

The U.S. government can not claim copy rights on work produced by government employees. Read the statute before commenting on it, especially if you're using it as a point of disagreement.

The one way the U.S. government can come to own copy rights is by purchasing them from original rights holders. No copy right exists for any work of a U.S. government employee.

You may wish to read 15 USC § 290e. There are other exceptions.

That is why most likely they will not succeed in economical sense. Commercial tech space is just way too fast for governments to follow efficiently.

On the contrary, we started Shakti because our lab can track technology faster than a commercial outfit ! I am an ex-industry architect and a startup CEO who came back to academia started this effort because the pvt sector was moving too slowly wrt CPU research and deployment. Done well govt entities can move really fast once you figure out how to deal with bureaucracy. And we can dream way bigger.

I agree, having worked in the American national lab system I can say that government research can easily keep pace with industry. Especially in risky or inherently costly industries, I'd argue that government funded research labs that work in collaboration with industry and academia are possibly the best equipped.

Thank you for the effort to free knowledge.

That is a compliment I will gladly accept. Look I come from a long line of theologians and philosophers dating back a millenia plus . The Indian ethos of not charging for knowledge has prevailed this long and I am not about to break a tradition ! It is not that we are averse to the ways of capitalism, folks from my family have funded and run some of the biggest tech startups in the valley. I have also run startups earlier and am incubating a couple now. So I know what free money implies. But the core ethos of Shakti is openness and that will never change. See my other effort - finlibre.org. Open source in banking and insurance.

I hold that there is no incompatibility between charity and capitalism. The market is an emergent behaviour of the personal desires and values of individuals. There's nothing anti-market about wanting to contribute to a public good voluntarily, nor to taking work that is ideologically more attractive to you (even at reduced pay).

It is not charity. Computing has become a public infrastructure like roads and water supply. So it is by nature a public good. The underlying foundation has to be based on the principle of the commons and not controlled by one entity. In processors just an ISA will not do, there needs to be open and state of the art implementations at every segment. That is the goal of Shakti. For example We also have GPS/NAVIC receivers and LTE modems in the works. Our comm research groups are far large than our compute groups, so no manpower shortage. They in fact came up with a short lived WiMax like standard which saw wide deployment via IIT incubated startups.

We shall see. Free money has hidden costs.

Really? Free and open source software—in this case, an unencumbered ISA—seems like an easy parallel to communally managed means of production.

Of course an implementation would be far more useful, as it would be the likely target for lawsuits.

I wonder if the C-bashers were saying something similar when Lisp machines were reigning unchallenged.

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