Where is the Indian microprocessor Shakti

Has The Indian Microprocessor 'Shakti' Disappeared ?

The story began at 2018 when the RISE group from IIT Madras, India manufactured an opensource  RISC-V architecture based microprocessor and booted Linux OS successfully on it. The thing is that if you are not from India then you might have no knowledge about its existence or you may have forgotten about it.

Basically the word 'Shakti' means 'Power' in hindi and as the name the processor was developed in order to create a powerful Indian competitor for other manufacturers Intel and ARM. The Shakti microprocessor has three core variants E-class, C-class and I-class you can read more about them in their official website but here is a short summary on the main purpose of  each class.

E-Class : Embedded class processor specially for robotics and IoT devices.

C-Class : Controller class processors specially for mobile application. (0.5 GHz-1.5 GHz)

I-Class : High performance processors specially for networking and computing. (1.5 GHz-2.5 GHz)

As mentioned above Shakti is an opensource RISC-V based processor (note: RISC= Reduced Instruction Set Computer) and this is the cause of  both advantage and loss of the processor and the explanation is given bellow.

Advantages of being an opensource processor

The fact that the designs of the processor is opensource meas that anyone from around the world can look at every single material and parts being used to manufacture the processor. This keeps the transparency between manufacturer and consumer and any problem in the design can be pin pointed and sorted out by professionals from around the world which makes it a lot faster and easier to detect and solve problems. Unlike ARM and Intel whose processor designs are private, Shakti's opensource design can be used by anyone to manufacture their own processors without facing any legal issues.

Disadvantages of being an opensource processor

Well if anything is opensource this means that anyone from around the world can use your design without paying you any royalty. For instance let us assume that Shakti some how became more powerful than Intel processors. Then in that case Intel could use the whole design of Shakti and maybe improvise it more and sell the new processor with Intel branding and the fun part is that Intel would not need to pay a single penny to the manufacturers of Shakti. This means that no matter how much achievements will be done by it those achievements would not be limited within Shakti processors and it wont even earn much from those achievements. This point will surely decrease its demand in market.

Current Situation Of Shakti Processors

Currently the processors are still on testing phage and the mass production date is still not clear. .With a collaboration with Intel a 22nm C-class processor was fabricated by Intel with code name RISECREEK and later another  C-class processor was fabricated in ISRO's Chandigarh Fabrication Facility with code name RIMO but this was based on 180nm which is way too larger. Its most recent achievement is being able too boot Linux OS and it has been 1 year since any valuable news on the processors were released.

The founders of Shakti have released an SDK for developers to develop applications and software for the processor. Shakti is really trying to come out of the testing phage and release in market however for a very new processor there is exactly no space in the market. Other popular processor manufacturers have already occupied the market since very long time and with advanced specialties such as integration of 5G and plans on AI other manufacturers are way ahead of Shakti.

To get a good and stable entry in market first of all they should make processors based on smaller nano meters or the standard size which will be accepted in the market at its time of launch. This improvement in size will increase its possibility of success in market by not making it look primitive. Talking about other features with the maximum available speed of 2.5 GHz (In I-Class) this speed is still not enough for the time and must be increased of up to at least 3.5 GHz to 4.0 GHz with similar improvements in speed of E-class and C-class. Being opensource some how makes Shakti processors secure and bugs free which might be its plus point for sales.

Then finally for initial release in market RISE group must convince consumer about their processor performance and also convince developers to develop powerful software compatible with it. Again due to the fact that it is opensource hardware manufacturers can easily manufacture motherboard and other hardware compatible with the processor. Its efforts til now include the SDK release mentioned earlier.

Since these days a lot of tech giants are targeting India for their market it would be more suitable if RISE group also target their own country and some other selective countries at first. The fact that smartphone or mobile market is increasing day by day in India the C-class processor has the opportunity to launch successfully more than other two classes. Moreover the long forgotten Indian smartphone manufacturers including Lava, Micromax  are planning to return to the market by launching new budget and mid-range smartphones, So RISE group can approach to those smartphone manufacturers with their C-class processors and if the deal is agreed Shakti will get a launch in the market and as it is an Indian processor it will also cost cheaper to smartphone manufacturers due to which the product smartphone's cost would be low but performance would be high.

Even if Shakti does not get a good launch in market it could still be used by the Indian government. So if treated well this processor project has a very good potential. For now there is no information about its use in future however still with the current known information the processor is still primitive and has a lot of rooms left for developement.

It surely is a very daring job to compete with international tech giants like Intel and ARM. Innovations these days are touching sky. With this devotion and use of human intelligence its pretty sure that computers are one day gonna be very efficient and intelligent.