AJIT, a ‘Made in India’ Microprocessor
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It seems to me that the interesting angle to this would be to avoid manufacture and instead spend your time on radical CPU designs on FPGA to be made from scratch later. No doubt that doesn't meet the needs of the folks in India.
Obviously, there is no such thing as "complete security" but you can try to secure what you can, that's why people concern themselves with what may seem like unlikely revenues of attack.
I mean depending on how critical your system is, it can really change how you operate. Get a virus on your computer? Some people use anti-virus, and when that says it "removed the virus" they're happy. Other people would only be happy with a complete OS reinstall from a fresh ISO made on a different machine as acceptable. Still other's would require new hardware, it's possible (and has been seen in the wild) to reflash the ROM of the motherboard, or potentially many other low-level chips through software, and to persist the virus through that. Likely no, just depends.
This has real strategic implications for India. So much modern military hardware depends on microprocessors. So what happens to India, if most of the chip fabs fall into the hands of hostile foreign powers? (Or, what happens if foreign powers who have or are near the chip fabs become hostile in the future?)
-- TFA
Older nodes, being well-understood mature technologies, can be manufactured domestically.
On the modern battlefield, one side having considerably more processing power than the other side might swing the strategic balance. This means more sophisticated missiles, ECM, battlefield coordination, targeting, etc... all on the side having access to the superior chip fab technology in wartime.
Now think about the chip fabs in Taiwan.
At least for space applications, it is common to use very old processes because of certification and, more importantly, processors that use larger processes are easier to radiation-harden. I don't know whether this also holds for military applications, but it seems at least plausible to me.
AFAIK, it is generally true. Military versions of the Intel x86 chips were generally one branding cycle behind. When hardened 486 chips were being used in F-16's 1st gen Pentiums were the norm for civilian use.
I imagine the design process requires a lot of high power computing, but when one gets down to implementing field devices, they typically aren't doing anything too high powered.
With that out of the way, yes, missiles now have a lot more computing power in them, even if they do more or less the same job- accuracy is generally the thing that improves here, as the physics models can be expanded to be more correct, as the number of sensors, and the way they are combined evolves, the end result is a better product. (And more Defence money, to boot!)
I've gotta say one more thing, though- a lot of the stuff in the military, and that goes to it, is built off now-ancient processes, because A) contracts, B) If it works, don't fix it, and C) standardization, so you may not see an FPGA in every missile, but they're getting there.
[1] this doesn't count as far as redundant parts are concerned, but it does give the engineers (and, by proxy, the customers) more trust in the outputs from the devices.
[2] It also costs way less space (and therefore money, to some degree, because mil-spec enclosures are expensive), to get two 1U servers than it does to have one vacuum-tube operated mainframe.
This is an important point.
In the future, polities who can't or won't fabricate their own chips will lose their independence to ones that do.
They say that the price would be around 100rs. At slightly less than that you can get the Allwinner A13 CPU, which is 1Ghz Cortex A8 ARM with a built in Mali GPU. Why anyone would want to use this in a commercial setting is beyond me. But it's a brilliant achievement on India's part, to make their first indigeniously developed processor.
Although their PR effort is outlandish, I'm pretty sure they are aware of the limits of this sort of project.
"We are planning to use AJIT in the receivers being developed for NAVIC or IRNNS (The Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System), an indigenous navigation system for the Indian subcontinent," said one of the processor's designers in a Reddit AMA (ask me anything).
Article: https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/meet-ajit-1st-ent...
Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/bfrh0g/indias_first_...
[1] https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/meet-ajit-1st-ent...
I would imagine it would be important to use an open ISA for such a strategic project.
My better guess is that they started it a long time ago. Long enough for RISC-V not to be in usable condition.
Hopefully, they'll redo the frontend.
Didn't get a chance to find out. Now we have RISC-V chips being developed with lots of companies getting behind it. Still easier to get ahold of SPARC chips, though. I'll also add that quite a few projects in academia used SPARC. OpenPiton being one that might justify using SPARC over RISC-V, esp if NUMA machine. :)
IIRC, an effort made by Western Digital has made it possible to cross-compile stuff for RISC-V.
Debian works just fine on RISC-V silicon. Right now the big thing seems to be getting real-time, hardware-supported JavaScript processing working so that the modern web works on it well.
You mean JIT, right?
The benefits of being interpreted falls flat when, in practice, everyone needs to run a highly tuned just in time compiler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#Open_source_implementati...
Some of their team contacted me about porting Fedora/RISC-V to SHAKTI. (Unfortunately because SHAKTI doesn't support the Compressed extension, which both Fedora and Debian require, straight Fedora/RISC-V binaries won't run on SHAKTI and so the whole distro will need to be rebuilt).
I think there's been some blur in the goal here. SHAKTI's aim is not to just build a Indian-based server chip manufactured abroad. For instance, if you see their tapeouts page (http://shakti.org.in/tapeouts.html), you can see that they have taped out a chip in India as well with 180nm..
Also, Compressed instruction support has been supported on SHAKTI since and a beta version is now available publicly. The reason for that contact was to try to port Fedora on the already taped out chip which does not support compressed instructions.
Runs at 70 MHz
https://old.reddit.com/r/india/comments/bfrh0g/indias_first_...
Good on them!
How many countries in the world have the resources and ability to manufacture a relatively modern CPU without outside assistance?
Sure, some of the clothing from RG can be a bit, gaudy, it's the more subdued stuff I'm into. Most importantly, build quality is literally off the charts. I have shirts from RG that I've had for 4 years that still look brand new, even the collar is still crisp and looks new.
$298 T-Shirts, ha. At that price I'm surprised they don't try to upsell a weave that affords limited ballistic protection.
For materials fancier than cotton you can easily spend 10x that, https://us.loropiana.com/en/p/Man/Shirts/Girocollo-FAF6689?c...
https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/meet-ajit-1st-ent...
Seriously asking, because just "xyz did N GHZ" makes no sense in this era.
1. Ultra-expensive, full-custom design.
2. A massive budget from a massive amount of sales to fund No. 1.
Most ASIC's being made use standard cell wherever possible because the companies, even very profitable, either couldn't afford full-custom or didn't think the cost was worth it. The few that do it are kind of like elite class of chip makers with piles of money. So, it seems improper to compare what a smaller effort on low-tech nodes can do with an elite, chip maker on what was then cutting-edge node. Maybe smaller players can do it today with lessons learned, current tech, lower cost of labor, and so on. Still be skeptical.
Note: I am keeping up with old techniques and processes at 350nm and up for subversion-resistant chipmaking. We stopped being able to visually look for backdoors at around 250nm or so. That means chips that will be verifiable by large numbers of people will have to be above that. I think I'd get 100-400MHz like those in this article, though, given my counter-arguments above.
India's government is the countries own worst enemy....
Indian government can definitely improve (and so can every governments of world). But since 1991 all Indian governments are taking slow steps in the right direction, with increase transparency and lesser corruption and bureaucracy (opening up the economy, digitizing governments, simplifying taxes, right to information act)