I agree mostly with Nefer. I want to add some technical info. First I have to say that I am not an expert on microchips but I follow some technical information on the internet as a hobby. There are 2 big parts of this product. Design and manifacturing. Those 2 are very complicated and big industries which works together to produce one thing. I have more technical knowlage on production (especially photolithography) thanks to my prior experiences but still I am not an expert on design and production.
I will try to explain why we are not producing it, why this is good news, why this is not so good news and why it is impossible for us to be competitive in CPU/GPU market in the next 2 generations.
This is a RISC-V architecture chip. We are not on the design team. It is designed by RISC foundation and many other companies(hundredws) including Aselsan contributed in small scale somehow. They design the chip, then they design some different versions depending on where it it going to be used and which wafer is going to be used then they give those designs and even masks to the companies who wants to use it.
It is like opensource software. You can use it, you change it but as far as I know you can not sell the changed product as a individual chip without permission. (duh!)
It is a good thing for defence industry and for computers which will be used by goverment because you know what is inside it. All american chips have "HARDWARE" backdoors which grants american intelligence. This is known now because this backdoor is used by russians, chinese, some european intelligence agencies and criminal organisations. This is the worst kind of backdoor because you can not patch it. Using your own chip or at least opensource chip has advantages for security.
It is not as good as we see in the news because it gives the false hope. We are not a country which produces its own design. We are not a manifacturing country either(like taiwan) or we are not a country producing production technologies(like netherlands). I always hate false information for propoganda. If everything is great why would we work hard to accomplish something?
Production is another problem. I know people who worked at aselsan and havelsan and now working at netherlands. They work at a firm which produces photolithography machines. Those are high tech machines used in chip production. We dont have this technology, we buy those machines and we have few photolithography systems with very limited production rate. (they are basicly machines used in semiconductor research) Do not get me wrong; Aselsan produces its own chips for critical products and this is a wonderful thing but building an entire new CPU is another thing.
Tech used in production and all the production infrastructure is extremly costly. Producing our own chips with our own instruction sets means that we need our own operating system, new software for everything and new entire chipsets for motherboard, gpu etc. So; starting from scratch is nonsense and risc-v makes more sense. You need to have the ability to sell millions of CPUs/GPUs to be able to compete and survive in processor industry.
This is what I was trying to tell. This news does not mean we made even one step in cpu manifacturing and those lies makes me MAD!
This is still good news for defence industry and govermental computers with low processing power needs. But this does not mean that we will be able to get into competetion with intel and/or arm and this definately does not mean that we are doing what they do. We can not compete with them in cpu/gpu market. This is not an option. Even chinese do not try to do that and they are just producing server chips for their own use in small scale and they will not compete with them in civillian market in the near future. (not in 10-15 years)
For example Intel has R&D budget of 13 billion dollars in 2017. This is added on the know how of decades of a giant technology and science firm. This is just one year of R&D cost. This is much more than our defence budget or education budget! Just think about what is happening there.
Moeny is not the only thing we are lacking of. We do not have good enough numbers of sicentists. We do not have enough physicists, mathematicians, material scientists from various expertise and we are losing every one them one by one.Most of my collegues are in Europe and USA today. They don't even come back thanks to the politicians and their fucking egos which makes it impossible to have a peaceful life and even work. You can not produce new things without having scientists. You have no chance to do this with egineers. Some countries including China tried that in various industries and all they could do was producing bad copies. Then they started working on science and know they are brightest star of the future.
At the old days; in the first 3 decades of Turkish Republic people were going other countries, working and learning there and they were coming back to teach and produce in their own country. Today people are running away and they do not want to come back. They are not escaping for money, they are escaping to breathe.
We are losing a lot of bright brains but are we creating new ones? Nope! Our education is so bad that we are producing millions of imbecile every year. There are students who does not how to READ in high school. Forget our univercities, they are already gone. They are just there to keep young people from looking for jobs for 4 years because there are no jobs for young people. Yes; we have some good scientists in our universities but it does not work with a few idealist people without resources.
So we are losing great minds and replacing them with idiots. This is why we have no chance to compete in high tech industries.
