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India to Create New Chip: Guess Which OS it's Using?
July 20, 2009
Posted by: Glyn Moody
A natural concern of major powers around the world is technological dependence on the US.
One particularly problematic area is that of microprocessors: practically everything is based on Western-designed chips these days, and if the supply of them dried up for any reason, other nations would have serious problems.
One solution is to create a new chip family that would be entirely designed and produced within the country concerned. That's precisely what India has decided to do, apparently:
The Indian government will reportedly bring together top engineers to design what is tentatively being called the "India microprocessor."
One of the design program's goals is helping to ward off what the government sees as the growing security threat poised by using commerical microprocessors in military, telecommunications and space systems.
According to a report this week in The Economic Times, the MPU design will be overseen by a new entity called the Zerone Corp., with an initial government investment of $200 million.
Of course, a chip on its own is not much good: you need an operating system to run it. And what might the Indians be choosing?
Designers will likely adopt Sun Microsystems' OpenSparc processor design technology (the open-source version of Sun's UltraSPARC T1 and T2 microprocessors) along with the Linux operating system and MySQL open-source database software.
In fact, they'd be mad to do anything else. First, because GNU/Linux is well proven, to say the least; it means they can take decades of work and use it straightaway.
Secondly, it's open, so the Indian government can be sure (a) it doesn't contain any backdoors that US secret services might have placed in other operating systems and (b) it won't go away.
These are pretty compelling reasons for adopting GNU/Linux in these circumstances, and I'd be surprised if anything else is ever used. Interestingly, China has already taken this route with its own Loongson chip.
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About the author
Glyn Moody Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).
Comments received
Jeff said on Monday, 20 July 2009
hey Glynn do you think the company will make the hardware open so they can collaborate with other manufacturers
Bob_Robertson said on Monday, 20 July 2009
I have to wonder why the OpenSPARC architecture isn't being picked up.
Dennis Muczak said on Monday, 20 July 2009
Read the article again ;-) The chip architecture is already under an open license (according to opensparc.net, mostly GPLv2). The GPL mandates that modifications to the work are made available under the same license, so everyone can potentially profit from this venture.
Glyn Moody said on Monday, 20 July 2009
@dennis: yes, thanks for emphasising that aspect, which I didn't. It's another reason why the project is interesting.
Bill said on Monday, 20 July 2009
China went with BSD for their military computer systems. Maybe India will pick between Linux and BSD. If they are going with the Open-Source version of Sun's T1 and T2 chip then why not use OpenSolaris. Solaris initially was derived from BSD. Not to change the subject but why is USA-DOD licensing 700,000 copies of Vista? Why is USA-DOD not worried about malware, virus, and back doors to other agencies?
MarkusR said on Monday, 20 July 2009
Bill,
Because the 'new school' IT admins DOD now has to rely on grew up pirating Windows so it is the only OS they have any knowledge off.
Yonah said on Monday, 20 July 2009
Why is USA-DOD not worried about malware, virus, and back doors to other agencies?
Because real security comes from knowledge, then putting that knowledge into practice. Not simply relying on some product, specification, or design and expecting everything to be hunky-dory. That's not 'old school' or 'new school', just common sense.
Leslie P. Polzer said on Tuesday, 21 July 2009
Nitpicking: the phrasing "chip uses OS" is quite misleading, since technically it's the other way round (chip can exist without OS).
Glyn Moody said on Tuesday, 21 July 2009
true, but in the title "it" refers to the Indian government (not clear, I agree)
TDT said on Saturday, 25 July 2009
Purchasing license of a software isn't the same as using it :) The USA-DOD may have purchase the license but are they really going to use them? Assuming that they will what will be the importance of the computer they are going to run them?