iGo said:
Considering the fact that the top engineers from ISRO and BARC alike organizations are behind this, I don't understand the mockery and pessimism that is going about this. Did u guys (who are mocking this) even care to read the article?? This chip is going to be used in Army and defense operations, it's not something they can afford to play fool around with. it's not some half-assed attempt like sub-$100 PC that ruling party tried to spin recently.
Thankfully, Its not just the 'top engineers' in ISRO or DRDO that work on projects like these, but a lot of work is offloaded to technology institutes like IIT's, IISc and IIIT. That's where the real talent is. My IIIT had one such important defense project when I was there.
Unfortunately due to the poor salaries in our Defence/Space research organizations and general attitude of our govt, very few really talented people actually reach these organizations. People who get there may actually get good at it after years of experience, but they do not represent the best of the talent in the country. From personal experience, I would say that a typical post graduate student in one of the institutes listed above is roughly equivalent or better than a typical 4~5 year old experienced scientist in ISRO, NRSA or DRDO.
iGo said:
I assume this is a RISC-based architecture as the article mentions Sun OpenSparc... which makes sense, as RISC still packs quite a punch with linux. Plus, I suppose it should be more secure compared to wide-spread x86.
I don't see how/why you linked RISC architecture to better security. RISC had its share of widespread use, its not like people cannot decode RISC machine code.