India develops DHRUV64, India’s first indigenous 1.0 GHz, 64-bit dual-core microprocessor.
It is based on RISC-V, an open-standard instruction set architecture (ISA). This is crucial because it avoids the expensive licensing fees and dependency on technology associated with proprietary architectures like ARM or x86 (Intel/AMD).
It is extremely important in defence and other strategic sectors to avoid reliance on Intel or Amd as there is extremely high chances of hardware backdoors.
It is aimed at industrial applications and embedded systems rather than pcs, smartphones etc. China is currently dominating this sector.
Target cases includes but not limited to Mobile spectrum uses, IoT, defence, Automotives, Space, routers, vending machines, traffic management, PLCs, set top boxes, etc
It paves the path to other upcoming processors which are more powerful. Dhanush, Dhanush + are currently on the way.
I really hope they will further develop this technology. It is very easy to ignore this achievement by comparing it into high grade processors but here we are:
Targeting different segments
Still in process of developing new architecture without relying on x86,x86-64 or arm.
I am happy a lot of people are watching Tamil Movies…D for Defence Dhruv, Dhanush….Who is nxt?
Anyway, all this new development is good to hear but what happened in Dubai should be an eye-opener. We are still hatchlings, shouldn’t compare ourselves with full grown Dinos.
I don’t think ALL risc-v products will be “huge power hogs” or “low perf” - depends on the product, right? risc-v is just an ISA that anyone can implement - so depending on the hardware side specs, it can challenge even apple-silicon, if not in pure performance, at least in performance-per-watt, no?
Good to know. Hopefully someday we might become the mainstream suppliers at least for mobile devices and stand toe to toe with Intel/AMD, of course it might take decades but not an impossible feat.
Of course, ARM is also a derivative of RISC V, so given enough money and engineering talent, things will go great.
But then again, ARM started in 1980s, and it took decades to become mainstream. So it’s gonna be a long journey, but not paying for ARM license is incentive enough for Qualcomm, Mediatek etc to do it, after a while.
It will take quite some time to attain the level of maturity, performance and efficiency with RISC-V that ARM has.
The main benefit is to not have to pay for ARM ISA. However, even if it is an open-source architecture, the chips are mostly proprietary, so not sure how it might benefit the end user apart from the one using the design for their own purposes.
However, it has provided a lifeline to China as they can basically skip all x86 and ARM licensing issues. Even if India gets into it, they will probably be lagging behind China in RISC-V development and export.