India shows off new homegrown CPU but at 100MHz and 180nm,it’s a bit of clunker | Hacker News Reader

India shows off new homegrown CPU but at 100MHz and 180nm,it’s a bit of clunker

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23 pointsakmittal8 comments

Intel had plans to setup a fabrication unit in India a decade and half ago. I was doing my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering back then. During our industrial training program we were told that India loses nearly 50% of energy in transmission loss. It's both due to a combination of theft and poor quality infrastructure. Voltage at the sockets can vary anywhere between 160 to 250 volts, whereas the recommended voltage is 240 volts. Many households use stabilisers or UPS for expensive appliances. We were told that the absence of quality electricity supply was the biggest reason why Intel chose Israel over India. It's important to be independent in chip designing but it's also a lot more important to have a stable grid that can supply the infrastructure for such delicate manufacturing process.

Apart from the energy supply, it sounds like Israel is way, way ahead of India when it comes to scientific prowess. The government is actively involved in building a good story when it comes to science - not something one can say about India.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Is....

That isn't the whole picture. It wasn't just stable power supply but the power required - fabs need the power equivalent of a small city at peak production. But a bigger problem than that is the amount of water it consumes and wastes. Water is a precious resource in India and indian states frequently get into a tiff on it when THERE isn't enough to meet the farmers demand for agriculture in their respective state.

In fact, even recently Taiwan Semiconductors (TSMC) expressed interest in setting up a fab in India, away from a planned plant in China, but the indian government is hesitating because water resources cannot be guaranteed. And so TSMC is exploring options in other countries.

Israel does desalination for water

@webmobdev That is interesting and ground water levels are already pretty low in India. Many cities are suffering from water shortages. We were only told about the problems from an engineering stand point.

@devxpy Absolutely. I remember listening to a podcast on technological advancement in Israel and it was fascinating. When the nation was still in its infancy the whole land was nothing but a desert. Israeli scientists found out ways to irrigate the land and turned it into what it is today. India lacks behind in semiconductor fabrication. However, India is one of the top five countries when it comes space exploration.

All things have to start somewhere. The real benefit of these processors is to build institutional knowledge and have engineering know how.

Everything else will happen inevitably. I strongly suspect the end goals for these projects is for cladestine defence applications.

With ARM now owned by Nvidia, RISC-V is more important than ever. India does not have any big semiconductor company, Hopefully some big corporation will pick RISC-V.

While slow, it's still better what anyone had just about 25 years ago. The civilization would certainly be able to operate with this level of performance.

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