Shakti Vs Intel Vs Arm

What is Shakti?
SHAKTI is an open source initiative by the RISE group at IIT Madras. Shakti is building many processors based on the RISC-V instruction set. They currently have 3 crore variants known as the E class, C class and I class.

E class is embedded application like robotic controller boards and IoT board. C class is the controller class for mobile like applications and can run at up to 1.5 GHz. I class is the performance oriented and can run at around 2.5 GHz clock speed. They also have plans for multicore processors that will involve combinations of C class cores and I class cores. They also have plans for a supercomputer-class processor which will be called parallel shakti or para shakti.

Why is Shakti difference?

Mainly because it uses open source RISC-V instruction architecture. Intel and AMD use their own. They do not share this with anyone. If you reverse engineer and make you will have to deal with court cases.

RISC-V is an open source instruction set architecture. Suppose you go to buy a car, but you are forced to buy a truck along with it. This is the problem with INTEL and ARM. You can not choose what specific instructions you want to use.You have to buy them all. We can use RISC-V to make custom chip design for our needs. As a bonus, many people responsible for RISC-V are also Indian so yey.

SHAKTI vs INTEL vs ARM

In case of ARM, it compares with the A55. It is honestly unfair to do this. The reason behind this is that most processors are based on von Neumann architecture which is an old structure whereas Shakti based on Harvard structure which is newer. Basically, Neumann architecture uses the same pipe for both water and gas that is instructions and data. Whereas Harvard architecture uses separate pipes for water and gas that is data and instructions.

Advantages of Shakti vs Intel vs Arm

The biggest one is security. When we buy a processor from somebody abroad we only know what they tell us. We do not know what they do not tell us. And that is a big issue for national missions. Shakti whereas lets you be involved in the design process.

Last but not least it is an Indian tech company. Only one of its kind as of the day.