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Comment by geo999 | Hacker News Reader

only needed to make a political statement, not really useful or competitive.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

India disagrees.

FTA:

> A processor made in India offers more than just the cost benefits. It provides the country with autonomy and self-reliance in the electronics sector and reduces our dependence on technology imported from other parts of the world. It also ensures a secure system with no opportunity for any backdoor entry, thus preventing digital sabotage by other countries or malicious organisations.

Did nobody watch Gandhi? Home spun is important!

Home spun was important. Now business has changed and companies are in a race to get up the learning curve quickly and capture new markets. It might be better if they partnered for foreign direct investment (FDI) in exchange to tech assistance. They don't have much to offer otherwise. There are many who would like to get a piece of the action in India, and the companies that try to go it alone will miss out on the globalization wave.

Elsewhere in this thread people mentioned that these CPUs are based off designs from the 90s. Maybe they're useful for controlling your nuclear reactors or something, but it's not going to be useful for general computing needs.

Embedded CPUs vastly outnumber the ones used for general purpose computing, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This is silly, general computing has been done forever in lesser processors.

Hence why you start with the stuff for controlling your nuclear reactors (and, perhaps more importantly, fighter jets and guided missiles) to develop the local engineering and industrial base. And then gradually evolve that into general computing.

They have to start somewhere. Despite what you think it's almost impossible to create a 7nm FAB from nothing. The fact they've made a 180nm chip which works is quite miraculous given how hard this technology is to master.

yeah, the Russians went this way too, ... , anybody heard anything else than one or two press releases ?

Why don't you mention China? I've lost track of the amount of cynical comments regarding their initial projects, and now China relies on the output of those research powers to supply their HPC centers.

Hell, this blend of cynicism was also directed at ARM's offering.

what I'm trying to say is that it takes a hell lot more than a team of 20,30 to create something successful these days. it takes a lot more than a piece of silicon that executes code to create something successful. only advantage they have is that they have the support of nationalism ... ARM was massively successful in the mobile space before they considered desktop and server and people start knowing them.

India has a population of 1.339 Billion. They'll have no problem finding/training more engineers to build up that team.

Baikal MIPS is available on dev boards you can buy: https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/09/26/baikal-t1-last-mips-...

They cost $1.44 USD, or INR 100.

it costs a lot more if you consider the cost of developing an actual product and not just a demo, it costs even more when you have to iron out bugs in the silicon ... when you buy a well established chip you pay not only for the silicon but for the maturity of the platform and ecosystem.

that “a lot more” is relative to the country’s currency value and their average high tech sector salaries...in this case, it would cost “a lot more” to do the same in US vs India

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