The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has released the software development kit (SDK) for its open-source Shakti processor. Shakti is based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture and was funded by the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The institute promised that a development board will also be released soon.
The RISE group at IIT Madras started working on the Shakti project in 2016 with a plan to release a family of six classes of processors, each serving a different market. The group promised that the reference processors will be competitive with commercial offerings in terms of area, performance and power consumption.
Now India, like China and the European Union, are showing interest in designing their own processors, rather than relying on ones designed by U.S. manufacturers.
With the release of the Shakti SDK, developers can begin to develop applications for the Shakti processors, even before they're commercialized.
