IIT Madras - Indian Institute of Technology - [IITM], Chennai - List of Professors and Faculty

Even though he has retired from IIT Madras, I would like to name V. Balakrishnan sir from the Physics Department as the answer to this question. He is one of the most respected faculty members of all time at IIT Madras. 

Sir’s knowledge of Physics is unparalleled. It is absolutely stunning how he used to link the seemingly disparate aspects of the natural world. You can watch his lectures on Classical Mechanics on NPTEL and Youtube. Sir acknowledged and answered the queries of all his students. Not only that, he took those simple questions and slightly modified them, thus leading his students to understand deep and profound concepts. 

Sir’s classes ignited new thoughts in his students’ minds, and led them to those answers which they never realized they needed. No one wanted to miss any of his classes, which speaks volumes about his teaching.

My brother is an alumnus of IIT Madras. During his time, Professor Kamakoti was one of the friendliest professors at IITM. 

Whenever sir caught someone sleeping in the class or coming late for the lecture, he would simply crack a joke and lighten everyone’s mood. He was an absolute master of his subject. The only thing which frustrated him was the lack of interest among students towards lab coursework. 

My brother is not sure if sir still teaches at IITM, but he always fondly remembers sir.

My brother is an alumnus of IIT Madras. According to him, it was a brilliant experience to have V.Balakrishnan sir as a teacher. 

The experience of watching sir’s lectures is the same as watching Cosmos or listening to Feynman’s lectures. He has an amazingly strong grasp on his subject. A lot of times, teachers don’t bother to teach some of the most important derivations. Instead, they put the entire burden on the students to figure out those derivations. 

Sir on the other hand, teaches his students every detail of a concept/calculation. He approaches every single problem from different angles, and each one of those angles opens a new perspective. Sir was the reason my brother decided to switch from Electrical Engineering to Applied Physics. 

V.Balakrishnan sir is a source of inspiration to many students.

As far as my knowledge goes, this is probably not the same. From what most people know, ARM is an old RISC processor. X86 is the older scaled-down version and as far as Shakti is concerned, it is a RISC-V processor which is a later version of the ARM (Acorn’s RISC Machine). It also follows the same concepts.

This probably means that if you are planning to do something new with Shakti, it would not have the outdated RISC label to it.

Talking solely about Shakti, it is mostly used as an exercise to demonstrate its ability to do design work and build processors in our country. The bar set here is quite low. They should make Silicon like the one at TSMC and that would probably have a much more lasting impact. This will possibly take some time but they will be there soon.